Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is my least favorite non-broken big budget game I've finished in years

I went into Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II with moderate expectations. The original Hellblade was a game I mostly enjoyed, and with a Metacritic of 82 it seemed like the sequel would also be a decent time. I wasn’t expecting it to blow me away but I thought it was a safe bet for a shorter game I could get something out of.

What's good about Hellblade II? It's pretty. I'll give it that. A lot of work went into graphics.

Instead Hellblade II is probably my least favorite big(ish) budget game that’s not totally broken that I’ve finished in many years. It’s a game that I should have dropped early on but kept playing to the end because it was short and I was hoping it would improve. It does improve around the middle, but not enough to be worth playing, at least for me. Its chief sin? There’s very little actual gameplay to it, and what there is I didn’t like (with a couple minor exceptions.)

Hellblade 1 is a very personal journey of an outcast who is both blessed and cursed with madness, pursuing the one person who she felt loved her even beyond the veil of death. Senua’s descent into the underworld is lonely, tortured, and desperate. Her isolation is key as she grapples with her inner demons, who take the form of voices in her head, which also appear throughout the second game.

Hellblade 2 starts with Senua intentionally allowing herself to be captured in order to find the slavers who have raided her village and captured her people so that she can free them. This depiction of Senua as self-sacrificing superheroine intent on saving her people is not entirely inconsistent with who she was in the first game, since she uses sacrifice to save others as a form of self-punishment and she is desperate to prove her worth. However the concept is complicated by the way these people treated her and the anguish they inflicted on her for the very condition that makes her special. I thought it would be interesting to see the game engage with these topics and the personal histories involved, but instead it glosses over them and Senua’s people never serve as more than set dressing for her adventure. Every major character who doesn’t live in Senua’s head is someone she meets for the first time in Iceland, where the game takes place.

This time Senua has friends. As you can see they're a cheerful and animated bunch.

These people she meets are in many ways responsible for the tonal shift between the two games. For much of Hellblade II Senua is accompanied by actual companions as well as the voices in her head. I tend to like games with companions to talk to, and the characters she encounters are all well-acted and decently written, but Senua not being alone (at least much of the time) totally changes the feel of the game. Hellblade 1 was a dark and personal story but Hellblade II is much more pedestrian, with lots of moments where you walk around while NPCs talk to you about the plot, and Senua’s voices chattering on about whether they can trust the other person or what their intentions are. You aren’t sinking into Senua’s madness and isolation because you’ve got buddies around to help pull you out.

To be fair the game does have moments of isolation that are closer to the first title. There are plenty of sequences where Senua walks around alone, listening to the voices inside her. There’s just a lot of walking overall. This brings me to the biggest issue I had with the game, which is that it’s more or less a walking simulator with about half a dozen combat sequences, which are bad, two non-combat boss encounters, which are good, and about half a dozen puzzle sequences which, again, are bad. Hellblade II kind of sucks to play. You walk around a lot listening to people talk. You find a puzzle, which involves a lot of laborious backtracking and searching the environment for the right triggers and not a lot of interesting traversal or fun brainteasing (the puzzles are not hard but they’re laid out in a way that makes them quite tedious.) Sometimes you fight, in cinematic battles where you only ever fight one enemy at a time with very limited controls and slow, weighty, combat that looks great but feels unresponsive. These battles again aren’t hard, they’re just slow and unsatisfying. For some reason I kept comparing the combat to that old mobile series, Infinity Blade, and wishing I was playing the iPhone game instead, which is not great for your big console release.

Combat is up close and visceral. Don't worry about watching your back because you only ever fight one enemy at a time.

For the first half of Hellblade II I really hated the game. I thought it was slow and boring, I thought that Senua’s arc was just repeating itself from the original game, and the only thing I liked about it at all were the visuals, which are technically impressive but artistically just another variation on the Scandinavian countryside we’ve seen in so many recent games. I softened on it somewhat in the second half. Senua and the other characters develop and grow in satisfying ways, the scenery gets more interesting, the story goes some interesting allegorical places, and there are even a couple of short but genuinely enjoyable (if not at all original) gameplay sequences in two boss encounters. A couple of the puzzles were truly boring with massive commutes around the environment to find the switches to press, and there was way too much aimless walking, but at least there were a few redeeming qualities I could hold on to and there were some moments where I could genuinely say I was having a good time.

Then the game ends in a final boss fight that was either the biggest damage sponge I’ve ever encountered or genuinely bugged. I looked up tutorials on how to defeat the boss, not because I was dying but because he was just repeating the same phases over and over (I paused the game multiple times to do this because of how long it was taking), and while I did eventually win I have no idea what I did differently. It definitely clawed back some of the limited good will the game earned by having improved for me after the halfway point.

This is not the final boss. This encounter is actually pretty fun to play.

One of the things that struck me most about Hellblade II is that it seemed like they made the game they wanted to make, it just wasn’t one I wanted to play. It looks great, there’s nothing specifically broken about it, it doesn’t have major telltale signs of massive amounts of cut content or missing systems. I just didn’t like the decisions they made. I didn’t like the amount of walking around listening. I didn’t like how they put the previously isolated Senua in social situations but didn’t really write her differently until the second half. I didn’t like the combat. I didn’t like the puzzles. I didn’t like the game. For me it was worse than Skull & Bones, and I didn’t expect to say that about a big budget game this year.

It’s okay that I didn’t enjoy Hellblade II. I kind of understand why some people do. Senua’s a decent character, the graphics are good, the story might spark joy in you in a way it didn’t for me, the combat feels weighty even if it’s unresponsive and a little opaque and the puzzles…are also present. But I think for me there needed to be more game here. I don’t know what they were doing for all this time, except making pretty graphics. Pretty realistic graphics are nice, but I spent a chunk of time this summer out in nature. Seeing a digital simulacrum of some rocks and trees and a beach just isn’t enough to justify spending 6-7 hours playing a game. The story starts slow before picking up, but it never gets better than decent, and there’s not that much of it for how long the game is. It just feels like an empty experience. A detailed virtual world they forgot to put the game into. When the most engaging part of an entire chapter of your game is scanning the environment for hidden rock faces to find lore collectables you’ve truly made something dull and forgettable.

I don’t really have any lessons to take away from Hellblade II except that sometimes I should bail on games sooner, and pretty graphics only go so far. What I will say is that it’s another example of Microsoft products coming out half-baked and underwhelming. It’s not a broken game like Redfall was, and it’s certainly objectively better than that fiasco, but I honestly might have had more fun with at least parts of Redfall (which I didn’t finish) than I did with Hellblade II. At least Redfall had stuff to do in it.

Hellblade II was a real disappointment for me. I won’t go so far as to say I hated it, but I wish I hadn’t played it. They executed on their vision in a competent and professional manner. That vision was just dull as the muddy rocks they so lovingly modeled.