</small><br><p>With Hellblade II releasing on May 21st this year, many have been wondering just when the marketing and further looks at the title might be heading our way. Well, the wait is over, as various outlets have had a first hands-on look, and we’re going to summarise their thoughts in this Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II Preview Round Up!</p>
Per Simon Cardy over at IGN, “Its ambitious narrative and accomplished cinematic framing far outweigh whatever shortcomings may be hidden underneath, and the incredible technology powering its beautifully ugly world is a sight to behold. It’s all shaping up to be another riveting, haunting, and uncompromisingly immersive nightmare of both Senua’s and Ninja Theory’s creation, and one I can’t wait to both enter, and escape, later this year.”
Per Josh West over at Gamesradar, “From what I’ve played of Hellblade 2, it’s clearly on track to be one of the most important exclusives that the platform has hosted this generation. Not only is it a fluid and responsive action-adventure game, boasting best-in-class visual fidelity, it’s also an experience with something meaningful to convey.”
Per Jordan Ramée via Gamespot – “Truly, May cannot come soon enough. I can’t remember the last time a game preview left me so excited to dive into the full experience. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S and PC on May 21 and will be available day one on Xbox Game Pass.”
Per Oli Welsh over at Polygon, “There’s no doubting the craft on display, or the immersive sense of presence this game has. It may be a sequel, but it feels like the start of something — like a true next-gen experience should.”
Very impressive that the combat maintains the mocapped look throughout. Made me wonder if we were seeing prefight cutscenes mixed in with gameplay in previous presentations.
Good previews! Interesting its still a very boutique style game. I like the IGN preview but I think they accidently say 70 hours for mocap rather than 70 days.
Ditto. I’ve been meaning to for months, but I just keep playing Starfield. But I really wanna play this new one on Day One, so I have to get going on the first one.
The good news is that according to HowLongToBeat it’s only eight hours. Technically could even do it in a day, but I don’t game like that anymore. More like a four day game these days. Still, that’s not too bad.
DD2 should have been yet another wake up call. These games are much more demanding than launch titles. Either console designer underestimated the future games capabilities or we overestimated the console capabilities.
Nanite really shook things up, much like normal maps did waaay back in the day. Its a pity AI upscaling wasn’t more invested in for the the current batch, it would have helped a lot.
DD2 is a whole other beast in terms of design and tech limitations, it’s pretty clear that Ninja Theory pushed for the maximum visual fidelity because the game’s presentation is something of a high value to Ninja Thoery’s vision for the game. Game will play just fine at 30fps, I am pretty sure that we all here played and enjoyed plenty of games at 30fps…
Also what you said about the launch titles/cross-gen period, all those who were bitching about cross-gen games didn’t realize that we got so many high frame-rate games because a lot of those games were designed with last gen systems in mind. Everyone who wanted “next gen” experiences from the start of this generation should prepare for more 30fps games.
Anyway game sounds really good, will definitely check it out next month.
