The whole progress felt kinda pointless. While there is a vast amount of rooms, some are just filled with enemies. Obviously they become stronger so your heart upgrades will be useless since you are going to die in 3 hits anyway. For the normal enemies it is not to bad, you will just begin to damage boost and jumping over them. But it feels just stupid for the bosses. Especially the underwater boss feels just stupid. You are going to get 2 new standard skills. The 3rd is just a combination of the other two. That's it. The magic is only used from time to time to solve a puzzle. I also found the checkpoint system unnecessarily cumbersome. Fast travel and checkpoints are separate and you lose part of you money when dying. So you usually can't save the money you got. And you are going to spend significant time to travel to the next bank. I also found it pretty stupid that you don't start with full hearts at a checkpoint and you need to heal somewhere first. And I felt like the hitboxes are not great. And the fast travel rooms don't have any music for some reason. So I can't really recommend the game.
From the beginning to the end the athmosphere is truly impressive and the graphics are great. I found it really hard to interrupt Hellblade and it really cool to learn about norse mythology. But I didn't like some things about Hellblade. It fellt more like a movie, which is interrupted by action/puzzling. Especially at the beginning I got really annoyed to watch another unskippable. And I found the figthing quite awful. You are always locked onto 1 random enemy. It doesn't matter who is attacking you or which one you would want to attack, it is always locked onto the wrong one and you will die due to that. It is clearly not built with keyboard/mouse in mind. I also had some technical problems with version 1.01, which should be relatively easy for them to fix.. There was something wrong with the resolution settings. I don't know to what the resolution settings are changed, but it doesn't change to what I put into it. For me the resolution used was to high. I don't know if it has something to do with using a 16:10 monitor, but it looked like it was always using the next higher resolution. Every time I died, the game froze for about a minute until it ran normally. The soundtracks would begin to run out of sync. At first I just thought the subtitles would just have flaws but the whole tracks seemed to get delayed somehow. The subtitles are not exactly what is spoken (especially further into the game) and I have seen some spelling/grammar mistakes. Why is the Hellblade Feature Movie not in fullscreen? For me it fills only about half my screen. All things considered, even with those flaws I would absolutely recommend Hellblade to anyone,.
