Hellblade 2 Thoughts And Review From MrMattyPlays - Luke Reacts

Matthew thank you for the five are you going to expand on your hellblade 2 thoughts and every review just talks about graphics and audio yet the order 0 1886 got blasted yeah I mean it's it's been pretty interesting the reviews and I I pulled up this one that we'll look at in a second I I want to break it down cuz I I've seen basically two splits in the reviews there are some that view the graphics and the production value as enough of a feature that it justifies the short like runtime and they say things like the the gameplay being lackluster the combat and the The Narrative and all of that stuff kind of takes a second place to the overall experience to the the broader experience that they're trying to portray which is very immersive and all of that and while I can understand that and I do think there will be some people for whom this is like a game of the year some people are going to play this and be like it is a masterpiece and I have no doubt there will be some people like that but coming off of a lot of excitement from the first game and and you know I really loved it I was expecting at the very least improvements to the first game and I don't see it if if you've never played a hellblade game before if you didn't play the first game then maybe this is like Masterpiece level because it's something you've just never experienced but for me it just feels painfully safe and and very very frustratingly I mean it's basically just Detective demo that I mean that's basically what it feels like it it has the gameplay depth of a tech demo and if we're going to bash games like Rise Son Of Rome if we're going to bash games uh like the Order 1886 then I think we got to be consistent as for its current Metacritic score I would give it time it's going to I feel drop once more outside reviewers get their hands on it I know some people I don't think I have it pulled up anymore but I I saw some people on on x that were posting and being like uh well you know it's sure it's not like the most amazing game ever but you know I still think for Xbox this is a masterpiece to have on their platform you know 10 out of 10 and then you look at their profiles and it's like they only cover Xbox stuff and they only talk about the and it it gets harder to give their review a lot of like weight when you know their background right in the same way that like if a hard hardcore Sony Fanboy that is always like yeah we need to to you know go in there and burn down Microsoft headquarters because they're destroying the industry by buying up competitors blah blah blah we need to do all this and they're just like the most toxic person ever if they go and then give some PL like uh uh what's that that new um rise of the Ronin if they give rise of the Ronin 10 out of 10 you're like can I really trust that review should I like how much weight can I I put into that review probably not much but a lot of reviewers I've seen that tend to be much more independent in their thinking and maybe have less predictable opinions on stuff because they just tend to to go out and do uh and say precisely what they think they've been much less stoked on it and one review that I I think was actually very very fair that he's actually gotten some Flack over was madd's Maddie posted to Twitter SLX uh this little thing disappointed by hellblade 2 as a big fan of the First puzzles characters pacing themes are not as strong here despite its beauty their sluggish pacing p uh in its 5H hour run time which lacks an essential fun factor which I completely agree with all of that some people are saying oh if you got through it in 5 and a half hours or whatever you were playing wrong I got that in in some of my comments on my video you're playing it wrong Luke you're supposed to really experiment with photo mode you're suppos to go through and basically not use the Sprint or jog button it's not even Sprint you're not supposed to use the jog button you're supposed to just go through the levels really slowly and carefully and cautiously okay then why did they give me a jog butt but okay it's it's like when people say uh well no you actually ruined Elden ring by using summons um the designers didn't want you to use summons I'm like then why did they put them in the freaking game what are you talking about same thing uh actually in death stranding you're not supposed to use vehicles uh you're supposed to only use the the like zip lines that you build so anybody that uses vehicles for deliveries is basically a a chump and you're like bro coima put them in there for a reason like the designers put them in there what are you talking about anyway anyway but he followed it up with this I usually keep to myself on Twitter because the platform is at times not fun to be on and I typically know better not to engage yeah just in general if like you see some of these content creators that are like terminally online and they're always in the comment section replying to every single tweet and you look at their profiles and it's like bro you tweet like four or five times an hour stop it get some help but he follows on uh I I agree with him though it's good often to just step away the replies I'm getting here are genuinely disheartening people calling me a liar claiming I throw my opinions to sustain my career threatening the game I'm working on pretending I'm a PlayStation double agent yeah I did see comments where people were like see this just proves that Maddie is on play station's payroll and he's an inside agent it's like bro you you guys have been go outside go outside like what what do you mean you think that PlayStation has people on a like on a a payroll just for double agent like this isn't some sort of spy Thriller like he's just a YouTuber like chill ax uh I didn't like the game as much as you'd hope I'm sorry if that bothers some of you but sing into personal insults threats and wild delusions over my take on a game is nasty and we should all do better than that I totally agree I totally agree it's outrageous but I think the why it it triggered so many people is because he posted a review just outlining this saying that he was disappointed in the game and Maddie has you know an Xbox podcast he's got a lot of Xbox themed coverage specifically that's kind of the niche that he's settled into in the last few years and it only made sense I mean he's he's um covered a lot of Bethesda stuff in years passed so once they were acquired by Xbox it made sense like go where your Niche is I get it but um yeah how dare how dare Maddie be honest and honestly reflect his opinions of a game that he just didn't find that impressive with our hellblade 2 review and uh yeah I found the game extremely disappointing and I'm going to get into that but definitely between a rocket Sony Pony in a hard place on this review not fun I'll tell you what because the Xbox community despises me they think I hate the brand and then we have PlayStation fans who despise me as well CU they think I love Xbox and then also there's that kind of weird factor in the middle of I kind of made comparisons between ninja the's potential and naughty dog and they didn't like that much and that's a take that's going to age like milk based on this review and uh yeah I'd like to issue a retraction on that one cuz I was definitely dead wrong worse yet I mean that was basically the pitch when they bought Ninja Theory in 2018 people thought like okay they're going to come in and they're going to be Xbox's Naughty Dog they're going to come in and have huge budgets and just go crazy and do amazingly high production value stuff and it'll be awesome I agree would be awesome Xbox needs somebody like that and ninja theia I still think could be that but they need to spend more than like two and a half three years on a game and they need to probably hire a lot more people because it's currently a team of about 80 people and that includes my understanding is it includes even like administrators the the accountant all of that stuff so maybe that is just the devs but either way it's a small team it's a small small team to be making triaa stuff so if they were able to expand and go bigger and better that could be really really awesome and I'd love to see it hellblade 2 is not that you know and I think a lot of us were hopeful that maybe this could be the first step towards that and while it's an impressive graphical showcase they have a long way to go before they're anywhere near the scale of of naughty dog certainly and then as for you know being you know upset or upsetting people who are PlayStation Fanboys versus Xbox Fanboys I think whenever you play in the mud you're going to get dirty and I think engaging with any sort of console war anything um or those communities will get you dirty and it's going to be messy regardless like I I don't try to engage with any of the console war BS and I don't think Maddie tries to actively engage with it but when you do a a podcast that's specifically for one platform I think you're going to get a lot of the those people gravitating towards you anyways and I've even had to juggle it where like I for example we covered uh Suicide Squad killed the Justice League and we got a lot of people that came to the channels from those videos covering that um debacle and some of the people that came from that were just like the cynical types they just liked coming in and watching games Crash and Burn so literally any game I would try to talk about or cover everybody's like yeah but when does this flop when does this and it's like no that's not what we do we skeptically evaluate things and when there's a bunch of smoke there's usually a fire but if a game doesn't look to have much smoke or any smoke I'm not going to pretend like this is some sort of big Scandal just for like rage bait and stuff and then you get those people calling you like you know simps for this or that or whatever but eventually they just get bored and leave you just can't feed them at all you know you just can't engage with it at all yeah it's the xbot community xbot community is particularly wild as is the PlayStation like Sony Pony side of things so it's just in general all insane and I think at the end of the day everybody will agree if you are a grown man and you tie up your personality into a hunk of plastic and silicon like touch grass it's okay we're Gamers we play video games it's all great you can have a preferred console you can enjoy PlayStation more than Xbox or vice versa that's all totally cool but when you go to the point where you're like threatening people's lives because they happen to play on another box than you like it's a platform it's a it's a platform unless you're a PC Gamer in which case PC Master race raah ra okay the circumstances surrounding hellblade 2 couldn't be worse for Ninja Theory there was already a lot of anticipation for the game Ninja Theory was acquired by Xbox oh dude mixer I forgot was for Ninja Theory there was already a lot of look at that anticipation for the game Ninja E3 2017 briefing featured by mixer I remember when I went to E3 2019 they had whole Booth set up just for mixer remember this was supposed to be the twitch killer this was going to be the new Big streaming platform and then they shut it down and abandoned it but man yeah mixer that's where uh Ninja went to that's I think he got paid out like 30 something million dollars to go leave twitch and start streaming on mixer he lost a lot of viewers but he got one hell of a Payday theory was acquired by Xbox in 2018 with what felt like a public statement to Gamers that despite what had happened during the Xbox one generation the was here to stay and invest in as a part of their business moving forward the feeling right now is that Xbox needs its biggest win yet in a time of great uncertainty surrounding both the company's Direction and the lifespan of its 30 plus Studios at the same time Xbox is under Fire because of its lack of marketing for hellblade 2 and what is their first major exclusive in 2024 and a potential Prestige product something they've said behind the scenes they're looking for to rebuild some public confidence in the brand the trick is guys gals is uh EXP box did Market this game a lot you've possibly seen like every Big Moment of hellblade 2 my naughty dog take may have been completely incorrect but at least I can hang my head on the fact that I called this one from pretty far away as to why hellblade 2 wasn't being marketed it wasn't really in my opinion being sent out to die there just wasn't much left to show as I'll display in this review announced alongside the Xbox yeah uh no joke I said in my review there's like what I would consider two big setpiece moments if you've played the game you know what I'm talking about let's dare I say giant moments no okay um there's like two big moments I thought there was going to be a big moment at the end of the game but there basically isn't the game just is over before it's before it even happens one of those two big like giant moments was already shown in the Gameplay trailer with the giant crawling out of the sea that's like that's one of the two big moments in this game and they already spoiled it and shared it so I agree in hindsight it's like what more could they have shown they either spoil the only thing left that was cool in the game or like they show more walking like what would they even do like there's nothing you could really do series X in 2019 many expected hellblade 2 sooner and I think the game would have actually faed better in my experience if it were just that maybe a launch title or something like that it's a game that feels like it's been lapped by much of its competition such as a plague tale requium oh dude the whole time I was playing hellblade too I was like bro I think hell or play requim is just better like it it's not on the same level graphically sure but it's a very interesting game mechanically it has some really interesting gameplay mechanics narratively it hit me way harder than hellblade 2 like way way harder maybe it's just because I'm the father of a little boy and so the whole thing with Hugo and everything was particularly haunting for me but I I love uh play tail reum I think it's a TR tremendous game and it's a franchise when was the first plague tail was that it was around the same time as hellblade right plague tail plague tale innocence came out 2019 it came out 2019 so they've put out plag tail innocence and a plag tail requium in the same time that that Ninja Theory has been working on this 5H hour game that's crazy that's wild oh KD cap right now go install requium like do it to it it it will it will blow your mind it is so good every conceivable way it's a game that could serve as a case study to show how perfectionism has seeped into AAA style games and lets them spin their wheels for far too long with little meaningful progress made for the actual players of the game merely just the technology it's a game that perfectly shows how a larger team Size Doesn't Grant you a better game Ninja Theory was around like 20 some odd people when hell blade one was made they were 80 with hellblade 2 and I think you can feel that in the visuals but when you play the game nope it's a game that shows you how mere graphical Fidelity can no longer carry an experience and in my opinion never could worse yet I think hellblade 1 is far better in almost every aspect it's level design pacing storytelling and even how it gets to the core of touching issu just that is cooler than anything in the game just aspect it's level is her trip to helheim is cooler than anything in the second Stell and even how it gets like that sequence freaking awesome there is nothing that cool in the entirety of hellblade 2 the core of touching issues like psychosis the series primary theme it delves deep into hell the combat could be argued as being better in the original given you no longer have mechanics like Dodge roll attacks and that's saying something given hellblade 2's combat isn't really having much going on there if I were to Define this as anything to put in a little bottle here it's Xbox's the Order 1886 moment thank you but even then it's crazy we did not talk before we made these reviews we made our reviews in isolation I think a lot of people think that like reviewers are maybe like hopping on Zoom calls behind the scenes to like coordinate their opinions and stuff no it's just sometimes when people are looking at something critically they come to the same conclusions it's crazy how that works right but I mean I I think a lot of us are on the same page with this where it just it feels like that order 1886 moment it's kind of a stretch which is why it's not in the title of the review I really like games such as the Order 1886 and ryome both served as showcases for their respective hardware and made no hesitation about flexing their technical might yet they didn't leave the most important factor behind fun both of these games in my opinion are very fun to play when they let you play rise's Combat is a guilty pleasure and its stories extremely entertaining leading to me doing full playthroughs twice over when I first bought my Xbox One atun lach the orders world and story take time but when it picks up alongside its gameplay I think it's excellent and then it ends it's that line there that you can closely draw between the order and hellblade 2 hellblade 2 has its fleeting moments of Excellence Beyond its visuals but they're quickly forgotten due to most of the experience consisting of walking forward boring puzzles where there are far too many might I add and unreasonably limited amount of combat encounters and an ending that leaves you feeling like there was so much left on the cting room floor here I'm going to get into Rich again I I seriously feel like they just didn't show the last quarter of the game like it feels that way detail now but that's the to Long didn't read hellblade 2 is a game that certainly I was championing I don't make Naughty Dog comparisons lightly and they completely missed the mark in my opinion and I far prefer hellblade one so ladies and gentlemen if you're new here and you're into the occasional day one review consider subscribing let's start off with the story I'm going to go very light on this section because we're talking about a game that has maybe a run time of 5 hours so Santa was traveling to kill the northmen who are abducting her people and enslaving them she's quickly derailed from that plan in a tale that feels like it made very little sense until the story's dying moments instead of this being a story focused on just sowa alone she's joined by a support cast that doesn't get much this is a great example of what I mentioned in my review with the overprocess this is a cutscene what is in Focus here in this shot is the camera's Focus pulled on on Sena you know just so I want I want to avoid anybody being like Luke that's a compressed video let me get my uncompressed well not totally uncompressed but it's a extremely high bit rate footage I'll pull this up here so nobody can say that I'm I'm being unfair with it cuz I mentioned in my review oh it's the same shot um I mentioned in my review that the cutcenes often look worse than the gam play because they overprocess it to the point where you lose all sharpness and it might be hard to tell on so I'll zoom in I don't know where the focus is pulled right now I think the focus was pulled to about eye or chin depth from the camera but it's so overprocessed with this chromatic aberration on the outside of the frame that's way too aggressive that nothing is is actually sharp in this entire shot the whole thing is is blurry and then they move and you think maybe they're going to adjust the focus a little bit and now it looks like the focus is pulled over here it's a little little Sharp sharper but even still like it is overprocessed to high holy hell like look at all that that fringing and all that stuff like it's a cool visual style sure but there it makes it actively difficult to figure out what you're looking at and then you go to other sequences like this and everything is totally sharp you know you go to gameplay and all of a sudden it's it's fine it's just wild to me that the game play actually looks worse in a lot of cases than the cutcenes just cuz it's overprocessed it's like they they knew that they were dealing with okay well camera's going to be really close we got to do all this crazy effects and stuff it's like bro less is more sometimes less is more calm down a little bit calm down just a little bit because you see even this this is a great example of overly aggressive depth of field in my opinion this is just a director photography like frustration I have a lot of games that have really impressive visuals will do this cuz depth of field is seen as like very cinematic right and that's the big thing with this game is it's all cinematic and you can see the the model that they have here is crazy detailed they have the pores of her skin faint remnants of like the the charcoal on her face and all this stuff amazingly detailed models even the teeth you can see the teeth are yellowed around the edges it's wildly detailed it's crazy but it's so freaking shallow with the depth of field the only thing that's actually like in focus is like this bit here wh let me get a a pen selected it's like this bit here this part of her cheek here and then maybe like this part of her lip and then this part of the teeth and like this part like that's all that's in Focus than like this little stretch of Band of her headband like these are the only things in Focus because of how shallow the depth of field is it's only this much of this like vertical slice of your face that's in focus and all they needed to do was like you know tighten up the aperture a little bit just a tad go to like an F2 an f2.8 something like that you don't need an F1 point or f.2 or whatever this is in order to make something look good it really annoys me that so many companies do this where they not companies but like uh cinematographers will do it where they just hyper overdo the depth of field it's really frustrating yeah in photography normally you're supposed to make the eyes and focus yeah and it's constantly moving that's the thing I think they did a manual thing so they did the the thing where they manually adjust the focus and stuff I think that's the goal but it's to me it doesn't it doesn't really click together I just don't I I know it's like well this was never supposed to be a gameplay heavy game I understand that but at the very least like I'm looking for what is the hook what makes this worth playing is it the story no I found the story shockingly poorly done it ends when it really should be beginning and just across the board it's it's done very very poorly in my view it's like graphically yeah it's pretty to look at but you can also get that by watching a YouTube video of a playthrough of it like you don't need to play it yourself uh to get that same thing so it's like okay well then what's like the gimmick of the binaural audio Yeah it's largely worn off doesn't work as well in this one compared to the first one okay um gameplay NOP gameplay is is really lackluster okay well are at least the set pieces and big moments cool enough that to experience yourself would be worth it no significantly worse set pieces than the first game like across the board it's like what what is the hook what is this what makes this good what makes this worth playing and there's just not really much of anything unfortunately much of an opportunity to shine outside of one who joins you at the Journey's very beginning and his development does add quite a lot to the story otherwise the short run time here see again what the hell is this Focus like I just showed you my recording that's why I said in my review like you will be hard press to find a sharp edge in most cutscenes cuz it's so freaking overprocessed with this wildly overused chromatic aberration drives me up the wall a lot of time it's done to cover up some of the like rough edges in digital um like CGI basically you'll see it in movies a lot it's why a lot of like Marvel movies have a very unique look whenever they use CGI on something and it's because they kind of do this post-processing to cover it up cover up the rough edges but with this like we're in a video game and you have the black bars already there's only so much to look at on screen and you can't even get it in Focus like this is a YouTube video right well that's why I pulled up my recording just a second ago to show you guys like even in my footage this is my footage which is recorded at 4K crazy crazy high bit rate and even with this like you can still see part of his his like lower jaw is maybe in Focus here like right here here his eyes aren't in Focus all of this cuz you can tell like all of these edges all of this chromatic aberration that's going on you can tell that they did like a radial filter on it so the center of the frame there's like an oval like this that's not affected by the chromatic aberration and then everything on the outside of that oval is affected more intensely the further away you get from the oval really standard radial filter on something like that and it just doesn't make any sense it doesn't look good like it's it's over overdone it's just really really overdone in my humble hurts as these added characters don't have much time to develop meanwhile s's journey is a depiction of how others interact with one who suffers from psychosis and the game displaying how her Darkness as they put it is a gift that can save her people I think I'm not entirely sure here and not because I'm an idiot it's because I think the game compared to the original does not convey its themes well enough throughout again this very short run time remember in the first game Santa was cast out because her psychosis is claimed to be a Darkness handed down from her mother that Journey was about her overcoming that alongside the grief of losing the only one who ever loved her and trying to bring him back to life in the sequel Santa is still coping with death but in a different way as it's following her wherever she goes and she starts to begin to blame herself for the death that surrounds her both past and present in hellblade one everything from its combat to even the puzzles was in service of an impactful story being told you didn't just fight to break things up you fought because it was a depiction of senoa struggles at that moment you didn't solve puzzles to extend the length of a game at least most times it was typically done in synchronization with senoa learning something about herself or the world hellblade 2 is the opposite in all regards and perhaps that was the saddest part for me about this review it feels like all that ninja der did to make the first game special was completely forgotten for pretty Graphics beautiful lighting and exceptional motion capture I think it's wonderful because it definitely is going to be technical showpiece but as someone who loved the first hellblade I feel like we totally missed what made that game special now for those who haven't played hellblade before one of its greatest strengths and it is present in this game is being unable to tell what's real and what's not however I think there was a thread that Ninja Theory kind of had their hand on that they would pull at times to really connect things and make sense of what was real and what wasn't whether it be through how encounters were set up and what Seno was actually fighting fighting was it her personal demons or actual enemies hellblade 2 does just that this game is super seamless in its storytelling there's no breaks for load screens nothing like that it just goes and that's one of the best parts about the game is you'll just have these beautiful transitions between reality and maybe not reality and then big cutscene and gam play and it's all again beautiful and seamless it is definitely something that many AAA developers are going to study but I think as a player of games there isn't going to be a lot for people to take away here because again when you go down to the story The main thing I loved about hellblade one as I raved about in my original review hellblade 2 I think just delivers things in such a Messier way and even when you start to come to understand what they're trying to do here by the game's final moments it ends it's over I saw who in chat said it it was so funny hold on yeah Juice Box she's being too expressive again hit the blur button dude serious it's like all through the game they're like NOP beep and just blur everywhere like even this beautiful shot wish I could see detail really wish I could see some detail that'd be great but no no just just do this blur it to [ __ ] come on guys yeah hellblade go just like I mentioned with the Order 1886 you're like okay I'm on board here if we get like another two more hours here this about to be sick Mossberg you read my mind yeah and then it ends now some may say well that confusion that's the point Maddie that's the whole idea of the game you're not supposed to really know you're supposed to be in s shoes you're supposed to really feel her pain her confusion and fair at the same time though I I don't know that's straight cope though it's the same exact thing when people are like I I keep bringing up death stranding but like when I said Hey in death stranding it's kind of tough for me to feel justified in going through all this trouble to save and connect the United States um after this apocalypse it's tough to justify that when I see like 15 people throughout the course of the game like you're not seeing Villages of people trying to rebuild you're not seeing anything like that you just don't like you see some Holograms of people when you deliver stuff but that's about it and people like well Luke that's because coima wanted you to feel the lonely of a post-apocalypse so you're supposed to feel like there's no one to save you're supposed to feel like all this other and it's like okay you came up with an explanation but it doesn't change the fact that we agreed on at the outset that you're trying to justify which is that it feels empty and like it's not worth saving you're saying well that's by Design and I'm saying it's a bad design and same thing with this where it's like we can point to all sorts of things like MD's bringing up that's the whole idea of the game I'm on board here if we get like another two more hours here this is about to be sick and then it ends now some may say well that confusion that's the point Maddie that's yeah the confusion is by Design it's all part of the system it's part of the equation dude it's okay it's a bad equation they should have changed it because you know what they're making the video game they they can change it if they want I can't I'm just the sucker trying to enjoy it but they can actually alter they have the power yeah the game is bad on purpose bro exactly it's just cope when somebody says well yes it's bad but there's a reason it's bad and for you not like if you don't acknowledge there's a reason then then you're the problem it's like that's not how that works that's not how it works it's like I don't know for a fact if this happened but like you remember in Elden ring when they broke melenia by accident and they patched it and so she started healing every time she did an attack not just when she dealt damage with the attack so it just like broke the fight it made the fight like impossible to to actually do unless you were like a god of of souls born games and I would not be surprised if people were like uh well actually it's always the well actually types well actually that's by Design because melenia is supposed to be the ultimate challenge at the end of the game so yes you basically can't beat her but that's because she's supposed to be so freaking difficult it's by Design it's like bro you're you're agreeing with me there's a problem and then you say but the reason there's a problem is because of this so that makes it better like no no like if my car gets a flat tire and then you're like well Luke it got a flat tire because you drove over a nail I'm like I agree but I still have a flat tire like it doesn't it doesn't change the facts of the situation you know like what do we doing the whole idea of the game you're not supposed to really know you're supposed to be in s shoes you're supposed to really feel her pain pain her confusion you're supposed to be in sen was Saga hellblade 2 and fair at the same time though I think hellblade one exists as a perfect example of doing that without totally losing the player and often times I found hellblade 2's story to feel quite aimless which you just can't afford to have in such a short runtime age as I'm about to hammer home here in many other ways Hammer I'll just say that I can't imagine hammering me Maddie many people are going to be thrilled to wait for a part three of sis tale after five plus years of waiting for hellblade 2 just to get to this point play for a few hours and go okay I got to wait another x amount of years for more it definitely leaves you feeling a little short changed the game's visuals do Aid its storytelling capability again God Almighty with the chromatic aberration is there like a term for overuse of a particular filter it's like Instagram photography levels like if you don't know I keep using the term so I'll just show you what it actually is chromatic aberration also referred to as chromatic Distortion color fringing or Sphero chromatic spherochromatism spherochromatism is a common Optical phenomenon that occurs when a lens cannot bring all wavelengths of light to a single converging point in other words it kind of stretches out like this so the example that people often bring is like yeah here's here's a good example let's just pull this up in a in a full full tab okay so like you see on the one hand this is a sharp image it's beautiful not processed or anything this is a an image with chromatic aberration applied as a separate outside filter and usually it's not really affecting the center of the frame and it ex it becomes exaggerated the further out to the edges of the frame you get that's the effect that they're doing within hellblade all over the place and once you see it you'll never unse it so you can see like on the top of uh his head he has like crazy color fringing on the top where it it washes out all detail even for things that are not in Focus like this it still ends up looking significantly worse because it's just super overused and games use this all the time and I think it's just a toggle they hit in their engine to be like oh look it's it's it's different so it's better right and I it drives me up the wall I I think this game would look significantly better if they just removed it except for very very specific story sequences it is overused like mad but that this is kind of one of the things that frustrates me in hellblade 2 is that they made a lot of choices artistically I think just to make something look more quote unquote cinematic the black bars the the extremely shallow depth of field and I understand they wanted it to feel cinematic but sometimes they just don't know when to stop and it just ends up making it so you're like this is a cut scene and it looks worse than the gameplay like I can't actually see any detail on his face with his skin because it's so blurred out and the chromatic aberration way too strong like chill out with those Instagram filters I mean it's basically a 5 to six hour movie so it does the job well the motion capture is absolutely excellent as is the acting the performance like again what is Focus here this Medallion none of their faces are in Focus I think they actually are technically in Focus but then they go over top with the the postprocessing filters and it blurs it out it's crazy here are really good in my opinion and can heighten some of the biggest moments in the game the voices though that Seno he speaking of psychosis earlier in my opinion are handled worse this time because they're basically like the yellow oh my God Maddie is just preaching to the choir with this one he's just every every every single point he's just hitting out of the park paint for storytelling rather than depicting Santa was uncertainty Spartans Baby Darling all of these points if you want me to pull up the individual shots in my own freakishly High bit rate footage I can do that for you baby darling I can do that for you cuz even this shot captured full 4K captured at a stupid High bit rate Hollywood grade with a ninja 5 Atmos capture card it's not even really a capture card it's used for for Cinema all of these critiques still apply yes it's less detailed in the YouTube uh footage sure but all of it will still apply to all of my recordings and everything that I've captured itself on the outside so if you want to keep coping you can keep coping but go for it dude the struggles that haunt her most times they just point out the obvious during very important cutcenes and often times they're speaking over characters already talking but that's the point Maddie she's experiencing this and you're feeling it through her shoes I again I I feel that there is a way to do it right hellblade one and a way to do it wrong hellblade 2 Beyond just having these voices speak over important parts of the story which to many may be a compelling part of hellblade 2 because it puts you in Zeno shoes further for me it was serving more as a distraction but perhaps my biggest problem is what I stated earlier which is the usage of the voices in particular pointing you toward various obvious things in the world you know how all these AAA games have yellow paint all over the place and they just guides you throughout the world think of that for storytelling when it comes to the voices senoa hears in her head which is or a trus when a trus is like after 5 Seconds look up there maybe throw your axe at that and break it it's like in line with other AAA games where they're telling you where to go where to climb who to talk to what you should do for your next objective it to me misaligns what the original point of the voices in her head were which was to guide Sena as a character right to evolve her character describe her thoughts paint a picture of that instead here they're used to well guide you to the next step it's not all the time often times her thoughts will develop her character and it's in those moments that I feel the greatest pain because it's like we're so close you have those moments where you're right there you get it and then you go back to using it as yellow paint instead of actually enhancing and exposing different parts of sena's character and the various thoughts she was having like someone would clearly be menacing and the voice would be like oh they're evil they're clearly evil clearly bad I'm like yeah I can I can tell he's got his weapon drawn on me it it would just in those moments not add to it again this is going to be something I think many people are going to have a problem with because you're not supposed to critique these types of things but I just think when you look at hellblade one they used it in a much smarter way to my surprise hellblade 2 actually does have a new game plus option that can add a little extra time to your play clock if you're so inclined to double dip I won't say what it is but on a second replay it may add some new wrinkles to the story it's not enough to save your experience if you're in my shoes but you may end up liking it a lot if you end up enjoying the main story of hellblade 2 yeah it's I guess I could tell you know basically they let you go back through the game again with uh effectively a new narrator it's like okay cool but I I like I don't I don't really see it as something that's going to uh make or break the experience ultimately I think games like a plague tale requium are perfect examples of how this style of design from 2017 has been La multiple times might I add but I think a plague tale requium is the best example because that was my game of the year in 2022 it's a game that managed to have that cinematic movie feel it put all the story at the Forefront no doubt about it this relationship between Amia and Hugo was literally all it was about much of the time in that game is spent walking around talking building that relationship but that relationship never forces you to sacrifice meaningful gameplay exploration interaction with the characters and its world this design was really left behind in the late 201s and I think hellblade 2 is a perfect example of why it's just been lapped by other games that looked at hellblade one likely and evolved it to wrap up the story segment before we move on to gameplay I just want to say that hellblade 2 does have a lot of Great Moments throughout in particular I think the second half is full of more good moments them bad as someone who's covered Xbox for the last half a decade Ninja Theory has always been clear that they wanted to deliver an audiovisual experience and even if you were looking for answers like how does gameplay move forward you typically hear something about motion capture lighting performance Tech that sort of stuff You' never hear about combat new moves even the storytelling in a sense you never really heard much about it it was always about the audio visual experience which hellblade 1 is famously known for the problem I have just to be extremely clear here before we move on from most of our storytelling critiques is that hellblade 1 didn't leave behind a ton of its fun factor and also managed to convey its themes and story in a much better Manner and that's why I may sound overly harsh with this game because the reality is I went and expecting an audiovisual experience and I did get just that but I was not prepared for quite frankly how boring and disconnected this game would feel and we'll talk about that now with the gameplay I yeah I think it's also just that specific Al it I think it's fair to expect some things from from games and at the very least I think it's fair to expect for a game to do better than its predecessor so if a game is a sequel it should be better than the last game that came before it and if it fails at being better than that then I I lose sympathy like at that point it's like okay well you didn't even upgrade this you actually made it worse that's when you can have a lot of disappointment um I thought there were weird things with hellblade 2 before it you know I got to play it but I I think specifically uh the fact that it it does so many things in my opinion worse than it's like the first game from seven years ago that that makes it really tough to explain away and uh and forgive in my opinion Juice Box another great game I think you're into is vampir which doesn't have great gameplay but the story and dialogue moments carry it anyway well it's also it's a really interesting premise for a game where you're playing this vampire and the power of your player character is tied to how often you like basically Feast on blood so if you want to play the most moral playthrough and not eat people basically through the story the combat and gameplay is going to be a lot harder than if you choose to just indulge yourself and have a basically an evil playthrough in which case the game becomes a lot easier it's a really cool concept where basically the game play is determined by uh the moral decisions that you make in the game specifically and it's it's a really novel idea that game at launch pretty rough around the edges you know that was tough to recommend when it came out but I I do think as like a double a game that one's really impressive really really interesting I agree I don't know how else to put this but what you're seeing is about the first 40 minutes of hellblade 2 yep okay it took me a second to figure what he was saying left stick forward yep just the analog stick forward and that is no exaggeration I know this because whenever I'm recording gameplay I have my elato software up there's a timer and when I pressed my first set of buttons for combat in the game I looked over I went oh wow 40 minutes no breaks 40 minutes I was like okay wow almost an hour of gameplay and I just walked forward the whole time and that wasn't the only time that would happen in hellblade 2 the pacing is absolutely Dreadful in hellblade 2 and look I am a massive RPG fan I don't want to hear from one person how I need to be more patient or more understanding I love these movie types of games I can totally get behind them all right and I have the patience to sit through 90 100 plus hour games but when your game is barely crossing the 5H hour mark you need to go you need to go much faster than this I'm not saying I need action constantly because it's not even that it's just compelling character interaction more happening on screen most this game is Graphics flexing as you walk through pretty Barren but extremely beautiful environments there's no denying hellblade 2 is the most beautiful game you can play right now in 2024 it is St I still think cyberpunk 2077 is more impressive um as a graphical Powerhouse and that's because it's not just beautiful like I think hellblade 2 is more graphically realistic visually you know I think it's more realistic but but I think when you factor in that cyberpunk 2077 is doing this in an open world the like path tracing it's capable of I think that that's almost more impressive um allenway 2 is also very very impressive but that has smaller levels so maybe that's closer to this but cyber Punk it's like bro it's it's up there graphically and it's fully open world and has amazing gameplay that they're doing as well you know stunning how good this game looks but that's also what most of the time in development was spent on how good the game looks and it's not because you're walking around and taking in the SS that the pacing is bad it's because you often times hit puzzles this is the same gameplay formula you found in hellblade 1 you would walk around a little bit you'd hit a puzzle you'd find some combat rinse and repeat how does hellblade 1 do it better in hellblade 2 I think things like level design went much further in hellblade 1 to make it more interesting to explore these locals number two I think the puzzle segments were in my experience and in my memory extremely brief I think three the combat sections and the storytelling sections were much more longer and stretched out thus leaving a lot more impact whereas in hellblade 2 you get puzzles like this bubble one where you're kind of switching between realities and it's changing the world around you you just focus on them there are the same Rune puzzles that you'll remember from hellblade one where you have to like focus on these symbols and match them all up but again like I I mentioned in my review you can't really fail these like you you just can't fail them in this one that he's showing on screen right now you have like three runes you need to get and there are three places to get the runes you walk through this doorway around the back you get the first Rune and then you go back out you go over to this left side and then you interact with something and then you go up there and you get the second R then you walk all the way back over here through that doorway behind the house and up the ladder and then you get this third run you can't fail it it's just busy work like these puzzles pad gameplay time without a doubt there's no interactivity there's nothing interesting at least in the first hellblade you really had to like look at the pieces floating in the air and figure out okay well maybe oh I got to I bet I have to stand over there then you go over there stand it line it up and it works in this game it's just Mindless remember from hellblade one where you have to like focus on these symbols and you're spoiling half the game hold up yeah we did we have talked about the game for more than 10 minutes we have basically spoiled the whole thing match them all up and this culminates in one of the all-time worst chapters in a video game I've played chapter 3 in hellblade 2 which is like the halfway point of the game by the way you are just running around dude it's so bad with a torch lighting fires for like an hour and that is it it is I'm sorry I'm not trying to be disrespectful but it is like snoozer time gaming like I was struggling to stay awake I am not like that not at all like I take my job very seriously here I don't want to to be disrespectful to developers I want to do what's best for gaming I am not like that man but this was really bad and again you just in a game this short you cannot have sections like this there's moments games that are much longer need these types of moments to be able to breathe like okay I I need this downtime to solve some puzzles because most of the time I'm fighting but most of the time in hellblade 2 you're just wandering and solving puzzles and the puzzles aren't really good or compelling or convey the game themes well enough they just feel like filler in I agree it's also like look how slow Seno is walking here this is when you're not pushing down left bumper and you're just like barely moving the left stick forward really cool and cinematic when I hear that this game took some people 8 hours to get through this is how fast I imagine they're walking through levels otherwise I have no freaking idea how it could take that long with this yeah that could take you eight hours to get through it's like oh there's actually in immersive mode Luke where you press right bumper and she drops to all fours and crawls slowly through the levels that's way faster that that not way faster that's way more immersive that's how you hit the eight hour mark it's like oh oh okay okay gotcha filler in an already short game what it led to is me imagining okay what if I plucked all of these moments out by the way only one of these puzzles I ever got stuck on but what if I just plucked all of these out this game's runtime would be cut possibly in half and I think that's why they exist they don't exist to serve the game in any meaningful way just to extend a runtime of an already tragically short video game which we already knew short was going to be the thing going in and that was fine with me it's just that how you use that runtime as everything I it's also they said eight hours I know some people are saying that it's like some people got eight hours some people got 9 hours uh Ethan says it took ACG 9 hours time is Rel yeah maybe somebody's closer to the Sun than I am um like I get that but there like there's only so many things to do in hellblade and the only way I could see you taking significantly longer is either if you are only walking and not sprinting maybe you're doing it for immersive reasons whatever maybe that's what you're doing if you're really struggling with the game play or if you play it on like very hard and you you're dropping dead a bunch and then you're restarting encounters cuz how it works is like if there's a 10 fight which not really 10 it's probably more like five if there's a 5 minute fight and you die four minutes into it you restart it you don't start at that enemy that you you died on so maybe in that way some people could have their gameplay time really extended if they got stuck on a combat encounter I could see that um and then if they got really stuck on puzzles or something I could see that happening but like other than that like maybe photo mode I I just genuinely don't know I genuinely don't know how you get it to like 9 hours I I just I don't get it I I I don't I don't know I don't know isn't there new game plus with more story I would not say more story you can basically go back through the game again with another uh narrator effectively I mean the the first run through was tedious enough I'm I'm not sure if I mean if you're really really into the story like Maddie was saying if you're really into the story maybe you get something out of it but I just don't know like for me I I don't generally count New Game Plus as part of the game's runtime I don't know when I would because it's New Game Plus it is a second run through of the game like even for a game like Starfield where the second run through of the game offers a ton of new stuff that's very novel and unique I don't think you would count that as part of the runtime of the first playthrough you know and hellblade 2 does not use its runtime well this is a bigger shame because the combat in the game which I have saved for last to talk about maybe mechanically leaner than its previous entry but I enjoyed the encounters way more the seemingly endless string of enemies you finish one and then another steps in and the way they step in maybe killing someone else and then squaring up with you it's seamless it's beautiful it's awesome you combine that with the ramping music the intensity of barely surviving no UI you don't know how much health you have some enemies hit harder than others it's so wonderful but at the same time you wonder where the enemy variety is I mean this is the same company that made DmC Devil May Cry I know people hate that game but I love the combat in it I get this is a story game but I think it's inexcusable that the combat has evolved so little in so many years you have a light attack a heavy attack a Dodge button a Parry block button and you can use your mirror to basically Mash through annoying enemies at times or enemies that you just need to quickly get rid of because you're low on health still I can't lie like even with less combat mechanics I really enjoyed the combat and hellblade 2 because it was about the intensity you could feel how you were barely hanging on at certain points and that made it great I think with some enemy Variety in there and a couple of extra moves I'm talking like maybe one or two just to Target these enemies we would have something totally different here but the fact that this combat is used so infrequently does the game a huge disservice not because my little action brain needs more stimulation it's because the combat can be really good and the moment it shows up it does enhance what's happening because it feels like it's in synchronization with the story unlike the puzzles unlike the extremely long walking sections the combat serves a strong purpose in the story unfortunately you can't say the same about the big moments in the game where I guess you could call them hellblade 2's boss fights you really don't fight anything bigger than a singular human the game's biggest moments are punctuated by walking SL running segments uh it's again a shame because there are bright spots as I've hoped I've shined a light on but I know it's mostly been critical and it's because unfortunately as I said the title hellblade 2 left me pretty disappointed I am really sad to say that because look guilty is charged put a lot of belief into Ninja Theory here I made the na comparisons I will own that one every day of the week but I was completely wrong clearly because while this team is a bunch of perfectionists as I accurately said I think they were perfectionists in the wrong areas ultimately leaving a impact factor behind which I know is goal one of hellblade and they failed on that front but goal two for hellblade being fun they missed that Mark too I don't know what the reception publicly is going to be for this game I expect something polarizing based on my experience I think some people are really going to love hellblade too I won't lie to you I can't wrap my head around why but it's definitely got that feel to it where for some people this game will just scratch that itch and if it does if what I've described sounds like music to your ears go ahead and try it out I would still want people to support hellblade 2 I love the first game a ton I love things from Ninja Theory in the past but even that shot that one shot is like cooler than anything we got in hellblade 2 except for like maybe one or two moments which were particularly big um but like that that shot is just one of many that you get in hellblade the original game and it's just so baffling that what they've done here with hellblade 2 I'm not going to depict to you as this tragedy I know that the emotions are heightened right now by many people watching this video because people want Xbox to get a big win and they need a big win and this game feels like it had to be it and I understand all that but for me just pulling myself out of that moment just looking at the game individually it just doesn't deliver on enough areas that I personally want and I was left feeling kind of short changed with hellblade too is it still worth like a Game Pass download you may be wondering yeah I think again this is a good weekend game if you want to go ahead and download on Game Pass but when it comes to the $50 price tag I'm sorry just can't say you want to buy this one at full price when it goes down in price or if you want to subscribe to Game Pass for it for a month sure go ahead I don't know if that'll help out the studio as we've already learned here with what's going on with Xbox but for you as the consumer that's not really your concern at the end of the day you're here to know if a game's worth your dollar and I would say a Game Pass subscription will do I'm thinking of like Phantom Menace Game Pass subscription will do anyway uh ladies and gentlemen thank you for tuning in yeah I think it's really good and fair review um again I'll share the Link in chats both on YouTube and twitch um so go show Maddy some love go subscribe and everything like that I just think in general it's it's a big old swing and a miss um there are some really weird design choices and you know I hear some some people who have previously been like big Defenders of Xbox posting stuff like this you know in my opinion we focus so much on what's wrong and not enough on praising what's right it's like bro your job is to appraise games and be critical when needed not to play cover when a game has obvious flaws um and I understand the desire to be like an optimist and let's just appreciate the good but here's the thing like there's no such thing as Optimist dollars when you are in a a position where you have you know a lot of expendable income or when you're working in the games industry and so you're getting games for free and stuff you can easily lose sight of of I think some of the value propositions at play I I just think like critics need to be critical your job as a Critic if that's what you are is not to play cover for a multi-trillion dollar company just because parts of your audience like them um your job is to evaluate a game and if that upsets your community that upsets your community if you honestly don't like a game your job is to tell people that and they can take your opinion or leave it that's fine like at the end of the day as a Critic your your credibility is almost entirely determined and and gauged on how accurate your opinions tend to be like if I say that oh I think that this game is amazing and this game's amazing and this game's amazing and then you see all of them they're actually terrible then that reviewer will lose credibility right in the same way that like if somebody is accurately describing something as problematic or bad or that they suck or whatever and then you try the game and it is actually backed up by that then they gain credibility with you and so the the the sort of social credit tends to have a way of sorting itself out a lot of the time where people you know they'll reveal themselves if they're if they're playing defense for a big company I find it ironic people are critical of critics for being critical well I think it's to be fair it is a vocal minority in my opinion from what I've seen there are some people that are very outspoken and upset about the critics that are are not loving hellblade 2 for example in the same way that like I got Flack when I said I found um Horizon forbidden West to be lacking I was like yeah it's like an 80 out of a 100 it's like a b it's not a masterpiece it's not amazing it's just like good or even pretty good but it's it's no Masterpiece or anything and people were losing their minds over that but you look at it and it's like oh it's like a couple hundred people who are hardcore like Fanboys of this franchise and they feel personally attacked because you're you're not liking something that they liked and it's just it's the danger of tying your personality into into a video game you know don't really care for hellblade but criticizing games for being shorter is so anti-art this mentality of judging games based on cost per hour ratio needs to go and it's just a screenshot um from hollow's playthrough cuz Hollow when the game went public posted his full game playthrough 5 hours 24 minutes long that's almost exactly how long my playthrough was interestingly enough and uh Kaa said 5 hours of gameplay for a AAA game is insane and to be clear it's all about value all of these things are value propositions if a game like pong releases at $70 in 2024 it will be viewed as a horrible value proposition especially because you can basically play it online through your browser and stuff like that but if that game released 40 years ago 50 years ago for that price that would probably be seen as Fair because the value proposition was different back then nowadays there are certain standards people expect for AAA money or in this case more like double a money since it's 50 bucks and in many many ways I would say almost every day every way except for graphically I think hellblade 2 doesn't meet those standards of quality in gameplay and story and scope and scale and setpiece all of that it doesn't meet those standards to justify uh its even doublea pricing I think there's a lot of doublea's that are or doua games that are significantly more a better value for your dollar basically I don't think it is anti-art for a Critic to say that something is a bad value if you're paying 70 bucks and you're only getting five hours of content out of it that is a problem um if you're paying 50 bucks and you're only getting five hours of content that can be a problem it's if the quality was so amazing that it's worth that okay cool but if the the quality is lackluster and then you're paying 50 bucks to get a lackluster experience then we then we have a problem and it's fair to bring that up like when people are like it's anti-art and they're just trying to step on like step on critics for being critical of stuff it's like okay well I I we're not going to stop being critical we're not doing that he took my thing red flag red flag 16 times the detail [Music]

Channel: Luke Stephens LIVE

Views: 55,148

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Id: 0ve9kZcz5zU

Length: 62min 6sec (3726 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024