3.5/5 ★ – clunkymechanics's review of Senua's Saga: Hellblade II.

Completed: June 17 2024 Time to beat: 6 Hours Platform: X Box Series X As I finally finish Hellblade 2 l have a lot of mixed emotions, leaving me unsure how I felt about the game as a whole. After I finished the first Hellblade I was losing my mind, how could such a perfect game exist? I was obsessed. Now I haven't played it since, and I can't recall if I had any qualms with it that I let slide since the format was so new and exiting. However my excitement for the sequel was quickly crushed by the annoying combat system, the rushed storyline, and the far too simple puzzles. That being said, Hellblade 2 still has a lot of ground to stand on - the art direction, sound design, and general ambiance are phenomenal. So much time and attention has gone into the cinematic elements of this game, I cannot deny that it has some of the best cinematics of any game I’ve ever played. However, after every perfectly executed sequence is a disappointing and frankly painful to play combat section. Maybe I was just burdened by resent, but after turning the difficulty down to easy I still found the combat to be frustratingly hard. I couldn’t grasp the rhythm of the combat patterns, which resulted in me dodging until I could use the cheesy time freeze move. I admittedly didn’t even finish the final boss, after three attempts I decided I would get more joy out of watching the end play out on YouTube. This is super disappointing because I wanted to love this game, and part of me did, but just not enough. I am hoping with time my frustrations for Hellblade 2 fade away like they may have for the first one.