Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I've played about two hours of Hellblade now, and I must say that it is excellent. It's highly atmospheric, and keeps you wondering about Senua's world. Everything in this Viking world feels deeply researched, and feels presented in as authentic a manner as this medium can present. The gameplay is challenging, but not punishing. The game also lowers or raises the difficulty depending on how well you do, so you rarely die more than twice on any truly challenging section. If you want, you can still lock the difficulty at high or low, if you want a quick story experience or brutal, punishing one. Graphics: 10/10 Story: 10/10 Gameplay: 9.5/10 Overall: 10/10 For those with budget rigs: I've played this in a laptop with a 970M GPU with no problem, and I've seen others use the 960M. I've also run it with a budget Athlon 860K CPU. The listed system requirements are far above the specs you really need to run it.

I thouroughly enjoyed the experience of this game and highly recommend buying. I wont spoil too much. The sound and visuals were very immersive, and the story and lore mixing together was done very well. In a nutshell its part beat-em-up, part walking sim, part puzzle, part movie all of them good. My only complaints are a handful of particular areas in game. (1) Hitbox glitches [even on doors] can be a bit of a pain (2) In the second to last stage of the game [castle area] my framerates dropped significantly and there was some stuttering despite my gaming rig being very good. I think there may just be too many moving objects on screen to keep stable framerate even with vsync. (3) Most of the puzzles felt on-point and clever with a theme or an area of attention, however a couple seemed random and thrown in...which was annoying. (4) Some of the cinema style events seemed a bit long and repeated taking away from the moment and immersion, it seems like the type of thing that could be fixed with a little editing.

Finally, the awesome visual of the Unreal Engine is used for something more than the usual FPS. Hellblade is an intelligent game, beautifully written, wonderfully characterized, personal and powerful, all while having an excellent gameplay and jaw-dropping graphics. If one really needs to find negative sides, I'd say the low budget prevented from making an even bigger game - but the price has been adapted accordingly. Watch carefully, game industry: much like movie industry, you don't need to have a home-made look & feel to be wonderful. Just as Hollywood doesn't only produce Transformers movies, it would be about time the big names in the game industry follow the example of Hellblade, and gives us something more than targets to shoot at. Continue like this, Ninja Theory!

This was an epic journey, and I thought it was totally worth every penny. Get on it , I don't know how it could be negatively reviewed, it has a story and charachters to propel it forward, and some of the levels are just Epic. Thoroughly recommend!

If anyone is here to think about buying this game or not, my answer is Buy it!, it is worth its price. It is not a long story, I've played it in less then 6 hours, but it is breathtaking. Ninja Theory did very good work, in graphics, sound, and most important in storyline. I would rate it on 6/5,, becouse it all work so well together that I was scared to finish it. Just like a great book, you enjoy it, you whant to read it, but also you are scared that after last page there will be nothing. Same thing is in this masterpiece, but mulply your best book experiance by ten, than you will know what to expect from this game. Thanks so much Ninja Theory for taking us in Senua's story. Enjoy!