fun with Hellblade
Reposting my review from 5 years ago down below, which is still up to date surprinsingly enough, I've been replaying senua 1 in preparation for the sequel and I haven't changed my mind about it. The game is an ASMR Schizo Walking Simulator with ok combat. I wish the gameplay had more depth, but it controls well as far as games with tank controls go and I like how cinematic and pretty it looks in motion. It's alright. The story not so much though.
I'm enjoying the combat system for what it is, the animations are fluid and smooth and can be both cancelled and linked at any times, landing parries and finishers feels meaty and is overall satisfying, I'm just annoyed there isn't more to it than that. The game does not tells you the extend of your combo chains so I found a few by myself (ie. light - light - heavy - light - light - light which will perform a cinematic finisher followed by a flurry of hits, this also works for heavy - heavy - light, etc., Running heavy - light does the same, but that's all I found so far.)
Enemies are rather docile and stay idle in the background (kung fu movie-style) even on Hard difficulty, you also fight maybe 3 of them at once tops throughout the game. Speaking of enemies, there's only a handful of them: dude with a sword, buff dude with a mace, buff dude with a mace but he has a shield now, slow fatty with a giant axe, and some dude wielding two axes. That's about it, not counting the actual bosses of course. Your tools to deal with crowds are limited, sometimes you'll see your sword going through two enemies at once but only one of them will get hit, I guess that makes sense as the game is more focused on 1v1 fights, but it's still annoying.
You can also activate bullet-time mode once it's fully charged which will slowdown time and put you into an invinciblity state for a few seconds. Senua has a couple guard breakers, a light attack, a heavy attack, 3 running attacks, various dodge attacks into a light or a heavy depending of the evade direction, and then a bunch of heavy charge attacks (you can chain a light into a heavy charge, followed by another light into another heavy charge, etc. each charge attack leading to a different heavy combo ender). Parry attacks can be chainged into 3 different followups, light, heavy and melee, you can also perform one of 3 running attacks using the same inputs, each starting a different combo string.
You can dodge and block. You can perfect parry some attacks, too. That's about it for the combat system, rather shallow but it feels ok for what they went with. The schizo voices in your head will cheer you on when fighting dudes, or outright tell you about how much you suck when you get hit, they have a tell when an enemy is about to hit you from behind and when your focus meter is full again to activate slowmotion and get rid of the shadow effect surrounding late-game enemies -- although parrying them will debuff them as well.
I don't know if I should recommend Hellblade or not, as the vast majority of the game isn't about fighting at all. I would describe Hellblade as a walking sim ASMR where you spend most of your time solving environmental puzzles, like the ones you see in The Witness (not the connect the dot puzzles, more like the "align shapes you find in the level design to form runes" puzzles instead). So you spend most of your time walking through empty (but pretty) areas and listen to (stone) audio logs about Nordic mythology, like about that time Odin transformed into an animal to have sex and about that other time where Odin had sex but didn't transform into an animal this time. What a prankster.
The combat is surprinsingly decent, imagine a dumbed-down For Honor. I wasn't expecting much from Ninja Theory but the gameplay is miles better than what they did with Enslaved. I don't really care much about the story, the psychosis and horror elements are tame, there's not enough reality-bending mindfuckery for my taste, the voices in your head are relatively sane all things considered, and I believe the reason why the dialogues are so mundane and uninteresting as far as PTSD schizophrenic protagonist go is because the writer who worked on the game was not insane enough. It's boring and not very out there. And as far as lore goes, recycling the Nordic viking myths is lazy, the devs could have taken the same legends but then changed the God names around and nothing would have been different, I guess they went with it just for the Runes aesthetics and so that they could focus on other aspect of the games, like as some sort of shortcut for the writing process. I don't know. Overall, it could have been worse but it's ok and I look forward the sequel even though at the time of this post, Ninja Theory haven't shown any gameplay yet. Hopefully they don't double-down on the walking simulator aspect and improve the fighting system instead, maybe give a bloody palace mode with endless wave of enemies. Add more gameplay basically.
On this page of the site you can watch the video online fun with Hellblade with a duration of hours minute second in good quality, which was uploaded by the user Milk Koba 24 January 2022, share the link with friends and acquaintances, this video has already been watched 5,631 times on youtube and it was liked by 168 viewers. Enjoy your viewing!
