Hellblade, review.

All the captures have been made by me.

SCORE: 4.5 CROQUETTES!

Heavenly Sword had two good missions, I find Enslaved boring and DMC... i'm sorry, you're not Devil May Cry 3, but aren't too bad either. Ninja Theory hadn't launch anything good for me till now. I had a lot of hype for this game and it has been able to live up to my expectations:

• This is FUCKING AMAZING:
• It's a game that gets to the point, no collectibles, no interfaces, no experience points, hability tree or any other videogame features that only pull you out of the experience, here there's you and your hability with the sword.
• The fights, God, I love how demanding they are and the great response of the controls, the movements are great and varied.
• Unexplained controls, I like the adventure sensation and discovering stuff by myself. It's a very intuitive game.
• Permadeath, this concept has caused great revolve in the Internet, but I'm really in favor of it.
• Dinamic difficulty, depending on how we play, the challenge gets harder or easier.
• Setting, the image is great and the sound is amazing, you have to play it with headphones for sure.
• This is great:
• The difficulty curve, in the puzzles and fights, everything will get harder in a good pace.
• This is why you lack half croquette:
• Bugs, I hate to criticize but there have been some technical failures that have ruined the experience, specially if your playing in PC with AMD. On the other side, there are some very optimized sections, I trust in the bugs resolution.
• Perspective puzzles, some very clever, but the game end up abusing of them and they get repetitive, even though the game EXPERIENCE IS NOT REPETITIVE.

Senua, the main character, gets into an island that doubts not to warn us not to go there, but we have a target, we are there to recover our lover, Dillion. To achieve our goal, we must find Hela, a godess who has his soul. In our way to find her we have to fight against The darkness, various gods and warriors, aside from overcoming some tests and challenges.

It isn't hard to know when I blindlessly fell in love with Hellblade, it was in the fight against Valravn, one of the first bosses. It's the greatest exponent of the combat in the game, where you learn everything and know what you'll face ahead.

A fight without any kind of break, with a lot of movement, varied, and when you have to think about every move or you'll end up on the floor. It also uses amazing parrys, which is awesome. And it is like that during ALL THE GAME.

It pushes you to the limit just like a Bloodborne would do, but without being a Souls (thank God) it's unique, and I love that.

Valravn

When you're about to die, you have to get up by pushing lots of buttons (you won't know you can actually get up till you learn it the hard way). You'll see a screen full of blood and distorted, also, Senua will be clumbsier with her sword. They give you one last breath, but it doesn't come free.

When you defeat a boss, the darkness will disappear and you'll have to walk your way back, this time, completely iluminated.

You can see it's an independent project in the way it's got a lot of innovative sections in which you can clearly noticed that they have taken a risk and the don't mind, They've made the game they wanted.

Mostly because of the visuals, Ninja Theory, the team behind this title, is a group of artists and sometimes you see such unique things that you can't compare them to anything else from any other game: scenes where our nightmares chase us caused by a beast, parts where we walk almost blindly...

It's tried to bring out feelings in the players that any other game had, with its setting, effects and, over all, it's soundtrack. The voices that escort and challenge us constantly won't go away even when we goes to sleep. The soundtrack doesn't look for protagonism, but it's great and creates some very epic moments.

Permadeath appeared, Internet started freaking out. It didn't seem to be a very popular idea, losing the game when you die lots of times? YES PLEASE, the game is contantly warning you about the danger of your adventure, making the player be at risk of losing the characters life is the best way to submerge in the story.

For the player to see how much life is losing, Senua's got a black stain in her arm, everytime she dies, that stain enlarges, and if it gets to her face, she dies completely, losing all progress.

Despite this, tests were made: people died about 50 times and still didn't loose their game. It looks like this "Permadeath" concept was something made with the purpose of intimidating and alerting, still, I have my doubts.

Puzzles, the perspective is greatly used and helps in not loosing interest in-between fights. Also, they're useful for the player to take a break.

Aside of the perspetive puzzles, there are some labyrinth sections and challenged to overcome in a certain time. They'll mess with our judgment and make us tangled.

I left the game abandoned for a day because of some AMD optimization failures. The first half of the game I could enjoy playing in ultra-quality and 1080p. The second half, with everything in low quality and 720p, didn't offer any improvement whatsoever. Even if you had a NASA PC (if NASA used AMD), it would run 15-20 fps. I beat a boss miraculously, but I didn't want to play in such a fucked up quality anymore.

I was waiting for a patch but I NEEDED to finish the game.

I got into the Steam forums and found a partial solution to complete what was left of the game.

I got mad at this happening, but I could realise that the game got me caught in it and I just wanted to finish it. Right now I'm in the middle of the second round, that must mean something.