Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice Reviews
In the end, Hellblade is a game that wants to have its cake and eat but forgets that it’s a game first and foremost. At times I found myself extremely bored with the repetitive nature of the game’s design. Open or vaguely circular arenas always painfully signposted another combat section and the visual puzzles, no matter how interesting at first, felt overplayed.
Promising and frustrating in equal measure, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ultimately disappoints with rote puzzling, unexciting combat, and storytelling that fails to connect emotionally with its audience.
Despite the lack of cohesion between these elements, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a grand achievement. The game development community will surely look to the performance of the game’s sales to decide whether the shorter, lower-budget Triple A game is a viable proposition. However, the game’s quality provides a solid case for Ninja Theory’s experiment being a success.
As the title states, if you’re going to play this game, then it’s best that you play it on a PC. If you have an Xbox One X? Then good for you! You get to have a better experience than most with this title.
I finished Hellblade: Senua Sacrifice with the biggest smile on my face, as the story and world engrossed me with vivid imagery for years to come. Understanding Senua's mental state, was great. I want more of the creepy storyline and that is a win in my book. It feels like a game handcrafted with care, as each sound and motion captured element propels the story forward.
There is something bewitching in how the immediacy of video games can lead to places other mediums cannot.
A technical masterpiece with some of the best swordfighting combat in years, but the storytelling and puzzle elements come across as muddled and awkwardly mismatched.
The performance capture truly adds a special touch to the already intense cutscenes, the audio department is stunning and visually it's kind of a treat: too bad that the gameplay elements in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice are just so shallow, bland and uninteresting, dragging down an otherwise deeply fascinating project.
Review in Italian | Read full review
As an interactive story, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is in a class of its own.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a powerful and significant piece of interactive media that, yes, is far from perfect, but successfully puts mental illness at the forefront of the concept, causing its players to come away from the experience contemplating exactly what they have borne witness to, and allows them to better understand the very serious realities that others go through on a daily basis. Ninja Theory earns a great deal of respect for what the team has managed to achieve, but also for respecting those affected by psychosis.
While in strict gameplay terms this lacks depth, and although it feels as if it tries to bite off more than it can chew on the storytelling side of things, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice turns out to be an epic journey through madness and Norse myth, and one that's worth a play-through or two despite its problems - as long as you aren't here for something more action-packed.
For all the warranted concern of AAA developers veering too far from gameplay into pure cinematic awe, there's no denying Ninja Theory's narrative depiction of mental health is an infectious one — the type of narrative that has been long overdue in this industry.
Still, I must recommend this game, as what it does is very important. To take something like psychosis and give it not only a voice, but a clear picture is not an easy task, yet Ninja Theory has succeeded.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice's story of mental illness is unlike anything we've experienced before.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice evokes the strongest feelings of empathy thanks to a great production, deep character development, animation work, special effects and unique sound. Unfortunately, boring tasks with runes and too simple fights in limited arenas with waves of enemies are not the best elements for an original and emotionally strong project. I hope that with good sales on PSN and Steam big publishers gonna work with Ninja Theory again and studio will release a game of DmC level or something even more great.
Review in Russian | Read full review
In short, we can say that we are in front of a title that presents an interesting story and theme, surrounded by a truly remarkable technical section, but which makes a small gameplay slide. Just as we could expect the fights are pretty straightforward and we have no progression of the main character (which is a little bit of a real deal, knowing what kind of title we had in front) but what most left us are puzzles. These make up the great totality of gameplay and often become monotonous and boring, as if they were just put there for broth. However, a title to be recommended for lovers of Norse stories and "mind games".
Review in Italian | Read full review
Hellblade is just as good on Switch as it was on other platforms, so now’s the perfect time to pick it up if you haven’t already had the chance to experience the journey of Senua’s Sacrifice.
As part of their “independent AAA game proposition”, Ninja Theory delivers a visually impressive game with a short but interesting story that touches on a delicate subject and couples it with some interesting mechanics that nevertheless don't fully condense properly together.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice demostrates that videogames can be the perfect medium to tell a story about complex themes. The depiction of a disease like psychosis is believable and deep. The story works out very well, but the puzzles and the combat system are the game elements that push back the the overall quality of this very interesting project.
Review in Italian | Read full review