Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Review
- Jan 14, 2018
- 3 min read
Title: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Developer & Publisher: Ninja Theory Engine: Unreal Engine 4 Platform: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Steam Genre: Action-adventure, hack and slash, puzzle Mode: Single-player
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By: Mitchell Cole
It Takes A Village…
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a dark fantasy, psychological horror. action-adventure video game developed & published by Ninja Theory. Play as & control Senua, a lost tribeswoman on a quest to recover her beloved from the clutches of dark gods, all the while fighting a darkness within herself that threatens to consume everything, including her very own soul. This moody game is a testament to what a developer can accomplish, while also a reminder what may happen if we reach too far for perfection. Beautiful graphics, & a marred graphics engine make for bad bedmates ultimately though...
Praise Be To The Gods
It’s easy to praise Ninja Theory in their development of Senua’s Sacrifice. In an ambitious move, Ninja Theory foregoes looking for a publisher, & instead strives to make its own game, while controlling its marketing & publishing rights. With the use of the Unreal 4 graphics engine, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a testament to beauty found within misery. A dark, brooding game based upon a real-life mental disability (Psychosis), & ancient Norse-lore painstakingly researched & retold through the use of a video game. Senua herself is created with such modern technology, that every detail of her character is perfection, right down to the veins within her (all of ours!!) eyeballs. Never have I witnessed a video game match reality in such a mirrored way. Senua’s Sacrifice’s character creation is truly a praise to the gods!
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice highly encourages plugging in your headphones for a ‘3-D Binaural’ experience. Truly, with such a push towards the mental disability, psychosis, the constant reverberation of ‘voices inside our head’, is a bit unnerving. I tested both with, and without headphones. Without headphones, the sounds, audio, & music tend to be muted a bit more, producing a less auditory experience, though nothing for worse...only less of the overall effect intended to experience the story in its entirety, which leads to the game’s worst offenses...
So Close, Yet So Far Away
Without a doubt, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a painstakingly crafted game rich in graphical power. What seemed to have been sacrificed for graphics was an unstable, lagging engine that continually pushes to stutter, or graphical glitches that ultimately ended my review on a bad note. NOTE: I ran close to 30 hours & made all the way through Hel to reach a save point void that continually casts Senua into a graphical void of no return or action. This type of glitch happened half a dozen times previously in which I simply restarted the game. The last glitch just as the story finally reaches climatic end, ended prematurely due to happening in the midst of a save point feature.
Glitches & lagging proved to be bothersome & cumbersome during matches against enemies. Fighting mechanics are solid but many times I found my system lagging, leading to frozen moments. This took a lot of tweaking & modifying before found a solution to eliminate a majority of my own systems limitations running this juggernaut attempt. All the same, the game continued to glitch at the worst of times, until the end when I could no longer proceed.
Overall
C+
Graphic: A | Story: B | Controls: C- | Audio: B | Replay: D
Overall, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was a good experience but nothing great. When we add the glitches that ultimately killed my journey 85% into the game, it left a sour expression or feeling on my part. Perhaps without these limitations Senua’s Sacrifice is still a good game but nothing truly great. The story develops but is a big stall for the first half or more. Without the headphones, which I imagine many never tried, it’s good, nothing spectacular. What shines however is a game with beautiful graphics & a lore that will eventually pan out to interest many who enjoy the genre or myths often played out in the video game world. What do you think? Let me know if you so choose or feel it… Until then, Gamers United!
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