'Hellblade II' is bafflingly disappointing… [REVIEW]

let me just preface this video by saying that I was a huge fan of the first hellblade game I thought it was groundbreaking for the time it was graphically beautiful and while the game play was repetitive and Bland in some spots I could forgive that considering the story was interesting the set pieces were epic and the game featured one of the most memorable and captivating endings of a game I've probably ever played so I've been very hopeful for this Sequel and considering that Ninja Theory the developer was bought up by Microsoft back in 2018 I was hoping that they would have gotten a blank check and all the time in the world to make this the epic adventure game the original had the potential to be however hellblade 2 is anything but an epic adventure game unfortunately this game is barely over 5 hours long despite the director and Studio head claiming players were going to get 8 hours of gameplay out of this which was already stretching it for a $50 game and honestly no matter how much I twist it and try to come up with how they could possibly stretch another 3 hours out of this game I don't know I mean they're saying that literally there's another 50% of this game here unless you're like the world's worst player and you're just like staring at things randomly I don't know how you get to 8 hours while playing this I genuinely don't my first run of the game which I felt was relatively leisurely took about 5 hours and 20 minutes and that includes any time I spent navigating menus and tweaking graphical settings but in addition to the lackluster length the combat and gameplay is ridiculously Bland and repetitive the puzzles lack any sort of challenge or compelling design and the narrative also lacks the emotional kick that the original game had and on top of all of this the game finishes in one of the most bafflingly underwhelming final boss fights I think I've ever played I'll try to be as specific as I can later in the video while avoiding spoilers and stuff but seriously the ending of this game is one of the most shockingly stupid and under in things I think I've ever experienced and I've played Suicide Squad kill the Justice League like let that sink in you can certainly praise the game's visuals as it is shockingly beautiful in some places but even that comes with a caveat since many of the game's cutscenes feature hyper aggressive postprocessing which washes out all detail and sharpness in the image and just to put this in perspective I was playing the game on a 4K OLED display being run off of a 4090 on PC primarily and while in gameplay the game did look sharp and stunningly realistic anytime I transitioned into a cut scene the image was so overprocessed with extra filters that you would be hardpressed to find a single sharp edge across the entire frame it's one of those weird games where the game play actually looks better than the cutscenes which doesn't really make sense to me but I think it's just because they are so focused on having like constant chromatic aberration super intense depth of field and tilt shift and all sorts of things that are really cool but it's overdone to the point where I honestly think the game looks better in gameplay than during cutcenes which is like the opposite of how it probably should be but listen I'm going to describe all of this in more detail over the course of this video and I'm going to try to prove my points as best I can for obvious reasons I can't show you a good amount of this game since for one I'm disallowed to buy the Embargo and also more practically because this game is so short that if I show you footage from after the 3-hour Mark I'm technically showing you parts of the finale of the game so I'm going to do my best to show you as much as I can to prove my points but understand I'm a little constrained but that being said if you want my spark notes opinion sen with Saga hellblade 2 is bafflingly disappointing and while it may be worth trying if you already have a Game Pass subscription just for Giggles I feel confident in saying that this is a game which is a prime example of why production value can only get you so far when making a video game it also raises significant questions as to what the hell Ninja Theory has been doing for the last 5 years since this game was initially shown off and of course shout out to Xbox for being brave enough to send me a review code they sent me one for Starfield they sent me one for this and I think that deserves some credit since I didn't have a lot of tremendous things to say about Starfield so the fact that they're still sending review codes even after that I think deserves a wee bit of credit so shout out to them for hooking me up as always make sure to like the the video if you enjoy this and subscribe and perhaps share it with a friend so they don't waste their money on a game that will no doubt leave them feeling miserable and disappointed to begin I think we should discuss the most obvious thing about this game which is that it is a looker hellblade 2 certainly pushes all the hardware to its absolute limit and it makes you feel like you are getting a taste of what current gen consoles can do which is refreshing considering this generation has largely been disappointing when it comes to titles that really push the hardware the tighter aspect ratio certainly makes the game feel more cinematic but it can also sometimes feel relatively restrictive and can actively be frustrating when you're navigating levels since useful information in the scene is sometimes cropped out regardless there were only a couple of moments while playing the game where I thought that things didn't look as good as they could have one I can't show you since it's from the finale in other words the last 2 hours of the game which is only 5 hours long but the other was from the gameplay reveal that they did years ago when the giant comes out of the water and is set Ablaze by senoa and her crew the fire in the original gameplay reveal was super smooth and looked really good but as you can see in the final release version with all of the settings maxed out all of the graphics drivers fully upgraded it actually looks more choppy and worse to me I don't really know what's going on here and maybe it is just a one-off problem since most of the fire and the rest of the game looked fine but I noticed this and I thought I would point it out and part of the reason I wanted to point this out is because the rest of the game looks so good so consistently that when something goes wrong it's really jarring because you're like so immersed in how beautiful everything is that when something's off it's just like oh right I'm playing a game and it snaps you right back out of it but other than that the game is a graphical Powerhouse there is no doubt the facial animations are Stellar character designs and material work are impeccable and the performances from all of the actors playing humans and monsters alike are all tremendous furthermore the audio design is not surprisingly fantastic and the game ran well without any big bugs or crashes there were occasional is when loading into new areas but my understanding is that some of these will be addressed in a day one patch when the game launches the day this video goes up if that's not the case then bummer it's not that jaring it's just occasionally you can tell the game is loading in a new section and you might drop a few frames but it's few and far between maybe every like 20 minutes so you know every like 10th of the game you might run into okay I'll stop but all of this to say the production value certainly is here but that was never really in doubt everyone who knows anything about Ninja Theory knows that they capable of putting together a pretty high-end product that looks it the question is whether the rest of the game comes together in terms of gameplay and the narrative and perhaps the scope that ties all of that together now the story as I mentioned lacks the emotional kick of the first game perhaps this is just because I'm particularly fond of the original game story arc for senoa so this one feels particularly underwhelming in comparison but regardless of the reason I found myself not really connecting to the secondary cast of characters which to their credit are a new thing for the franchise which is at least something you see the first game was pretty much all about Sena and the voices in her head which made those voices all the more haunting and also exaggerated the sense of loneliness that the protagonist herself would be feeling and connected the player with her in that way you had flashbacks or conversations that were playing out in her head but no real people that she was interacting with so it worked well thematically and was also practical considering the smaller budget and Tighter scope of that first game so the fact that they're bringing in secondary characters that senoa gets to speak with should be an upgrade but that brings me to one of the big realizations that I had while playing this game and that is that it is effectively a misery simulator you see every character in this story is sad depressed and likely has done terrible things in the pursuit of ultimately doing the right thing it's not a novel story but it's one that's certainly workable furthermore the binaural audio which was so groundbreaking in the first game does make a return here and is intended to simulate the effects of psychosis to make the player feel as though they also have voices in their head constantly talking to them and while it was an interesting feature of the original game in hellblade 2 the gimmick has largely worn off as a result you are left playing a game surrounded by miserable characters in a terrible and miserable situation with simulated psychosis constantly playing in your ears which I know this Mak come as a surprise to some people but having simulated psychosis is not pleasant it's dare I say actively unpleasant and to be fair that is exactly why the developers wanted to give people the opportunity to experience psychosis in this simulated way but ultimately it means that as a video game this is a deeply unpleasant game to experience and that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be experienced but it is to say that this is not going to be for everybody and it's much more of an art piece than is a game to be played after a long day at work I think with the first game it was so different and interesting that it was a feature in and of itself but in this game the voices that are in your head talking to you basically just replace the HUD that's kind of all they do they just say oh look over there look over there oh there's something up there run down there oh we must get away slash him cut him you can do it oh that hurt that's all they're really saying and so it makes you realize like this isn't really adding to the experience it's either just actively annoying or it's miserable in the sense that you have voices in your head that you can't get rid of it's a cool thing from the original but it's just not made any better or really utilized this time around it's just a thing that's going on that makes the game play experience worse and it still doesn't really add anything to the narrative even if it is a tasteful and respectful presentation of what psychosis would be like to experience if if you've never experienced it before even if mechanically it's accurate in terms of function in a video game it just Falls flat as far as I'm concerned this time around now typically the Saving Grace for a game that has a very miserable story in characters can be the game Play Look At The Last of Us Part Two For example a game which has phenomenal production value in its own right and is in many ways a misery simulator itself but it brings phenomenal gameplay to the table as well to balance out the overall experience the player will have sure something horrible may happen narratively one moment but the next moment you're going to get a slow ride on Horseback and a flashback with Joel to level it out or you'll get the chance to clear out an encampment using really interesting and compelling stealth systems and that's what makes the game work you need moments of levity and game play in congruity with like really intense narrative sections otherwise it's just so intense emotionally that players will get drained and disconnect and unfortunately that is a balance that hellblade just does not strike I was hopeful that hellblade 2 would up the ante and rework the combat system and the puzzles that were so often criticized from the original game but unfortunately I am sorry to say that the game play is largely untouched from the original you still solve puzzles by aligning things in the environment and you still have a very simplistic combat system which is now focused entirely on taking on one enemy at a time but that still relies on your standard slash slash Dodge slash SL Parry sl/ Dodge rock paper scissors type of combat that the original game had the only thing that really changes with the combat is how it's basically presented to the player so when you take on one enemy you'll take them down and right as you do a finisher another enemy might swing their axe landed in the back of that other guy you just took out and then swing it around and then come in and fight you from there it's really smooth and it looks really cool and cinematic but mechanically it's basically the same and it's not any more interesting or compelling it's just more of it uh which is also not true because I feel like there was a lot more combat in the first game this time around there's a lot more walking as opposed to combat and puzzles like a lot more walking so I feel like they took the criticism of the combat not being that great in the first game and they're like oh also people didn't like all the puzzles Okay cool so we'll just take that out and replace it with walking cool right no it's I it's genuinely baffling again this whole thing is just baffling I I'm I'm stunned now listen I know the game's developers said that they did a lot of work on the combat system to improve it specifically back during that developer direct that Xbox did but honestly I have no idea what they're smoking the combat is largely untouched and if they did do something to it it's not noticeable it's flashier it looks graphically really impressive the animations are really really good but when you're talking about a game play System it's about how the game plays and if the game play is the same but it just looks cooler like the game play is the same like this is 101 I just it it's not really altered it just looks cooler when you're looking at it but when you're playing it nothing's changed in addition the puzzles in this game actually feel worse when compared to the original yes in the first game they were highly repetitive but at least there were a lot of them and they were trippy and cool enough that I at least had to do some thinking while doing them in this game there is no challenge at all again I would show you these things but they're not allowed in the Embargo so I will just describe it it's basically that you as a character are here and then you want to get to here but there's a wall so to do that you need to collect three balls and put them into a little pedestal that's in the center of the Arena so to do that you walk over here and then you interact with something that removes a wall so you can walk through and grab a ball you walk back and then you put the ball in the pedestal and then you interact with that same thing again to put the wall back you go over here interact with another thing to put a ramp up but get rid of that wall you go up the ramp and then you interact with that same thing again to get rid of the ramp but bring the wall back and you walk across the top of the wall as a bridge to another ball and then you walk back and do everything in Reverse to put it back on the pedestal and you do that like three times to open the door and then you walk through like that is all the puzzles are in this game it is bafflingly bad it's not even a puzzle because puzzles require some level of thought it's just tedium you just go here do this series of actions that you cannot fail and then do it in reverse to go back and deposit the thing you needed to deposit or collect it's bafflingly bad even compared to the original game it really just feels like whoever was responsible for the cool perspective altering puzzles in the first game was just straight up absent this time around there are the occasional cool environmental Easter eggs that can be found such as when you find a stone face focus on it and then it changes to reveal a new pathway but these are very few and far between are optional and the reward is usually just the chance to focus on a little tree in addition to all of this and what I would say is most damning is how this game attempts to justify its short length as I said at the top it's a little bit over 5 hours long you would have to be unbelievably slow working through this for it to take 8 hours to finish maybe they were timing it assuming you never touched the left bumper button to speed up senoa from a walk to a light jog but other than that I seriously have no idea how it could take you 8 hours to finish this now when I finished the game I was genuinely so shocked that the credits were rolling I stopped and like looked back through the footage I just captured to see if something had bugged or something because I really thought I had accidentally triggered a secret ending that skipped the last quarter of the game after walking it off for like 10 minutes I came back in and I I I rebooted the game I was like okay that was weird I'm just going to like go through the Final Chapter again cuz from the main menu you can reselect chapters so I did just that I reloaded the final chapter and I played through it again to see if I had missed something or accidentally done something and no the game just is that short and it ends so abruptly that it feels like something is wrong it feels like the game broke it's that jarring and out of nowhere and part of the reason it's so jarring is because there is no final big set piece or boss fight or at least not one that I would consider big or set piece again I can't really show you this since it's the very end of the game but seriously like the whole time you're approaching the end of the game they're talking about this big thing that you're going to see and that you're going to have to take on and it's like ooh ooh this is what's going to make this all worth it this is what's going to justify it being shorter is that they went all out for the finale and knowing what they did with the last game how amazing that finale was I know this one's going to be awesome and then it just straight up dust happen and they try to frame it as a plot twist but it just sucks like it's just bad and I know that they are capable of so much more than this which makes it all the more infuriating again the only thing I can compare it to is like the bafflingly stupid final boss fight against Brainiac and Suicide Squad kill the Justice League where you're like how on Earth did anybody think that this was enough to finish and Capstone your game that's super short like you're framing it as everything is going to be so epic that it's going to be worth playing even at 8 hours even though it's actually five but seriously they just like don't do the final boss fight and then they're like yeah but it's part of a Twist that I can't really explain to you and it's it doesn't matter it's just lame and the twist is stupid I'm sorry I'm riled up but it's cuz I I care I really know what these guys are capable of and I was so hopeful that they were going to just do a one two like fake out and then just hook me over the face with a round House of emotion in this finale but instead what they presented me with was just like it it's not even playing it safe it's not even mediocre it's just baffling and so all of that to say while we were expecting the justification for this game being shorter to be that they were going to go bigger and better and it was going to be super high production value though in a smaller package what we ended up getting was just a game that is worse in most ways than the original and that doesn't do anything more Epic more interesting than the original you see effectively in this game there are two big set pieces and encounters that justify this game being shorter in my mind the first one I can't show you because it's one of the specific things they said I cannot show you at all which makes sense it's like one of the only cool things in the game so fair enough the second one they showed off in a gameplay revealed trailer years ago and just totally spoiled it's that giant crawling out of the ocean yeah that's like one of the two cool things that that happens in this game and like you see almost all of it in that Gameplay trailer they just totally blew their load and showed you all the cool stuff there like it's genuinely shocking and again they set it up all through the final chapter as if you're going to get another big cool set piece and it's going to be another super cool encounter and it's going to be the coolest thing about the whole game and then it just doesn't happen I would love to be able to show you this and explain to you precisely why but of course in a I'm a little bit limited so maybe come over to Luke Stevens live my second Channel where I'll be streaming and I can talk about this a little bit more cuz I I am so genuinely baffled by it I I don't even know how to put it into words there's a fly it's driving me crazy I'm losing my mind ah the point is after all of this buildup nothing happens they blue balls you and the game ends the credits roll and you're left sitting there wondering if you're the one that screwed up and maybe skipped the actual end of the game but then you realize that you certainly are not the one that screwed up and listen perhaps this review has come off as overly aggressive and I don't really intend for that to be the case I just genuinely care about gaming and I care about franchises that I know and love and hellblade and sena's story has been one that I have followed closely for a long time I love the original game and like I said at the top I thought it was like in many ways breathtaking it was wildly impressive it was risky and groundbreaking in so many ways and to see this come along and not even really play it safe but just be worse is so dang frustrating and maybe it's just cuz my expectations of Ninja Theory were too high maybe that's what it is maybe when this review goes up everyone else will be calling it you know game of the generation and it'll all be tens out of tens and people will be like Luke what are you talking about the game's amazing you're you're totally off base but I mean frankly I don't know how anybody would look at this package and say this is an impressive offering other than graphically it just is mindblowing that this is what they've spent all these years making you see they made the original hellblade back in 2017 and then Ninja Theory did a handful of VR games and a failed live service game that launched in 2020 and was abandoned less than a year later after playing hellblade 2 I have to wonder whether or not those escapades had some effect on what the studio was capable of since I firmly believe that the Ninja Theory of 2017 could have and would have done a lot more than this as I think they would have even found it wanting furthermore all of this perfectly explains why xBox wasn't marketing this game until about a week and a half ago when they started putting up the occasional ad on YouTube videos or Reddit posts my guess is that they did internal reviews a few months ago and realized that this was far from the Epic AAA Adventure game that was destined to take on naughty dog but rather it was a really pretty Tech demo that they were going to charge $50 for and after they realized this it seems that they pivoted off of pushing it really hard as the next big thing and decided to save those marketing dollars for a game like Indiana Jones that's coming out later this year and will perhaps be a better Ambassador for the Xbox brand regardless of what went on it still is a shame considering this game was announced going on five years ago and in those five years they've barely scraped together 5 hours of content and what is here while graphically incredibly impressive is either moderately or barely improved or is straight up significantly worse than the original game from before they were owned by a$3 trillion company unfortunately this game did not come together and while some people may get a fun kick out of it for half of an afternoon I certainly cannot recommend that the average gamer go out and spend $50 on this nor sign up for Game Pass to try it honestly the only thing that would be fair in my mind is to make this a tech demo akin to astrobot and included in consoles by default to showcase the power of XBox charging 50 bucks for this while below AAA pricing still feels extremely aggressive for what is here more than anything with hellblade 2 I'm not even mad I'm just flatly disappointed

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 328,975

Keywords: luke stephens

Id: x2PAhL9UCyg

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024