Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I give it 3 stars just for the majority of the game is great. They seemed to have completly forgotten the most important thing in a game and that's the gameplay. I went in expecting this awesome psychological warrior game, all it ends up being is a boring, annoying puzzle game. The puzzles are so lame, it breaks the immersion. The whole intro gets you sucked right in and then bam! The puzzles just have you asking "Why? WTF! I was left with bewilderment and complete disappointment. Who ever decided on these puzzles needs to be sacked. After the first 3 or 4 puzzles, I just couldn't play it anymore. Clearly the gameplay was an afterthought, and what we get is really a tech demo. The story telling by some random is done well, the sound effects and voice whispering in surround sound is awesome. If only they had good gameplay to accompany the rest of the game. The graphics, animation, player character, textures, world design, atmosphere, sound, all top notch. I think you guys need to work better with your teams, because someone left the poor gameplay team outside of the design meetings. It's a shame.

The story is extraordinarily good and the graphics are very nice. Unfortunately there are some technical flaws. The game ran good most of the time but stuttered at some places. Changing settings didn’t help a lot. When I died, the game sometimes crashed or freezed. I also encountered a bug, where the game turned completely black. This could be resolved, with the help of support. Gameplay is okay but nothing super creative. When your in a small space and have to fight, the camera is very annoying, because it gets into walls, beams, or other objects. So you often die needlessly. But when there’s enough space to move around, the combat actually feels good and is fun. I recommend waiting half a year or so, until they patched the major flaws. But after that, it’s all worth the money. The story is something really special.

Now that I've literally been to Hel(heim) and back, I have to admit: it has been a very long time since a game has taught me anything (probably as long back as the point-and-click era). Hellblade gives deep insights into psychosis and schizophrenia and it takes a lot of gut from a game developer to treat this subject in a non-trivial way, not to mention the risk of scaring away customers and hence sales by offering more than your hack&slash feel-good experience. The guys at Ninja Theory are professionals. I urge you to check the making of documentary that comes with the game to have some faith in humanity restored.

Hellblade uses many novel and tried tecniques to deliver what I consider to be the best pacing and atmosphere in any game I played, which is quite an achievement considering they number in the thousands. It's a great effort and hopefully a precedent to explore this topic in other games. Hopefully with more to them than just the topic alone. Also some of the best acting performance I have ever seen, incredible animation and almost perfect production quality. Beyond that, however, Senua's Sacrifise is an example of a focused product - literally everything that doesn't directly correlate with the game's main theme and story exposition is as barebones as it gets. Top-notch quality, but barebones. The combat - primitive, exploration - primitive, puzzles - primitive. Even the menus are primitive. What elements do exist, exist solely to contribute to the theme of psychosis, like the adaptive difficulty, audio warning and the focus(i.e. time slow) mechanic. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifise is an experience worth having and a game worth buying, but another one like this will not be needed. Games are more than just atmosphere. Much, much more.

From an artistic and narrative viewpoint this game is exceptional if given enough time. Game mechanics are... average though hence why it doesn't get 5 stars from me. Voice acting is great, Graphics are great, Stylistically it's great and it's length is just about right. On top of that Senua is such a fantastic lead character which I did not expect. It's a game that forces you to feel both uncomfortable and compelled. while it tiptoes on the line of the horror genre it's primary narrative at it's core is psychological. There's some touchy themes which it does a pretty good job of integrating without feeling too exploitative. Here are my problems - The gameplay sometimes feels loosely tied on to an otherwise solid cohesive narrative - There's some visual puzzle solving that lacks variety and sometimes feels clunky -Sometimes combat felt good, other times I felt the camera was restricting and awkward. Getting surrounded and spamming the dodge button felt lacklustre No conclusion in this review just some light peer pressure... I absolutely encourage YOU(Yes I'm talking to YOU) to play this game though to the end.