I was looking forward to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice for a little while before it came out last month. For the past few years, it’s been featured prominently on many of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine promotional materials. There is a great reason for that; Hellblade looks like a AAA game. Moreover, Hellblade pioneered some additional technology that has slowly worked it’s way into the Unreal Engine over the past few years. For example, take a look at this outstanding real time performance capture from GDC 2016 below (skip to 5:21):
They also pioneered the ability to capture Stereo Panoramic 360 video from the engine. They helped come up with the Stereo Panoramic Capture plugin that lets you capture stereo right out of the engine (with some work involved). This was huge for me last year as I worked with two companies in New York who needed 360 video out of Unreal.
As you can tell, Ninja Theory and Epic Games have been working closely to make Hellblade a show piece for the engine to developers of small teams. As an enthusiast of the engine and a lover of unique games, I couldn’t wait to play this.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is out, I’ve played it, and I have some very mixed feelings about it.
I will try to keep this Spoiler Free but no promises. Consider yourself warned.
What I think it does well
The biggest thing Hellblade nails is the main character, Senua. Senua is a conflicted warrior from an old tribe of northern England who’s come in contact with the Vikings at some point in her journey. Her quest throughout the game is to confront Hel, the queen of Helheim, to revive the lost soul of her loved one.
As you play the game, Senua becomes a very interesting character. Her internal struggle becomes the focus of the game as you play, and you witness it becoming a bigger and bigger mountain to overcome as the journey continues. This struggle highlights Senua’s rather…significant flaws. This serves to make her an extremely likable character as she’s, in a way, Rocky Balboa. Who doesn’t root for Rocky?
Attached to Senua is the actress who played her. I think she did a fantastic job, which is pretty incredible as according to the ‘making of’ vid that comes with the game, Senua is played by Ninja Theory’s own Video Editor Melina Juergens. I think she did an excellent job. Perhaps acting is in her future.
Hellblade also does a good job of creating a sense of place. The graveyard of ships, Helheim, the flowery fields, the sense of being in the land of the Celts and Vikings thousands of years ago really sticks out. What’s more successful than any of the other areas in the game as an environment is a segment were you are wading and fighting enemies in a land of blood, bodies, and hands grasping at you from the walls. It’s a crazy scene and one that I definitely enjoyed running through.
What it does poorly
The biggest issue I had with Hellblade is how it functions as a game. Most notably, that it’s not very fun.
Combat is a simple affair against 4 or so enemy types, not counting bosses. These enemies all have specific patters that you are to recognize and plan for. So far so good right? Unfortunately it stops there. Senua has a strong and weak swing, dodging, block (which I literally NEVER used) and the ability to run in her fighting toolkit. You chain combos together with a mix of button timing and order. It sounds a bit deeper than it really is as I found myself using the same two or three combos over and over again, and constantly dodging.
I get that Hellblade is not really focused on the player executing a God of War style button combo chain on some crazy boss with 8 heads, but Ninja Theory should have tried to add a bit more variety in enemy types and a bit more variety in Senua’s arsenal. After an hour or two, combat was a fairly repetitive task for me that got worse as the game went on due to being padded with what felt like an endless swarm of the same enemies over and over again.
During boss fights, I felt the combat improved. I think this has more to do with the relatively few bosses in the game, and that each boss had individual styles of combat. That variety is what was missing from the majority of the other combat encounters.
Adding to the lack of overall fun were the puzzles. This is certainly more of a “Dan thing” and is very subjective, but I fund the puzzles to lack variety and go on way too long. I had more fun with the ‘portal to alternate realities’ puzzle set because it was a maze with out being a maze, but the Fire God’s set of puzzles was a bit of a bore. You spend time looking for symbols to unlock doors in the environment. It’s simple enough, but there isn’t much complexity given to them until they re-appear towards the end of the game.
The puzzles in Hellblade follow the design philosophy of teaching the player a mechanic, have them use the mechanic, then add a twist to the mechanic later on. That process would have worked great if not for the nagging issue of pace. Once you learn the mechanic for the symbols, it’s stretched out too long, which bored me. The twist on those mechanics didn’t re-appear until much later in the game (though it should be said that you may choose the order in which you tackle the gods guarding the door to Helheim).
Those are my biggest gripes. The puzzles were boring and drawn out for the majority of the game and the combat was serviceable but lacked depth and a hook to keep me playing. The only hook that kept me involved in the game was Senua. For me, a great character or a great story will trump poor mechanics (Mass Effect is not what I would call a fantastically designed game. Mass Effect 2 and 3 however…).
I had some other issues as well that very few people will notice. I’m an artist in the industry and art issues usually stick out to me. Rather than a full paragraph, I’ll present this in outline form as each point is pretty self explanatory.
- Senua looks exceptional, but the environment assets don’t. They aren’t bad by any means, they just don’t match the quality of the character (even when considered as a whole scene). I believe it was a technical choice to cut corners with environment assets to make Senua as believable as possible.
- The terrain has a number of hard edges, which really doesn’t matter. What does is the relative lack of change from a greybox level design to the final art for the level. Some spots are worse than others. What bugged me the most was the super obvious ramps that still exist in the final game. Natural terrain never looks like that.
- I would have liked to see some decals used to add variation and wetness around some parts of the world. This is more of a polish choice and perhaps the performance would’t have been there if it was done.
- The real life actor portrayal of a few of the people Senua has memories of instead of modeled characters stood out to me. It’s perfectly understandable and brings me back to the days of FMV’s in games. It just wasn’t 100% successful to me.
- Don’t look down when walking up and down stairs. Senua floats really bad. Stairs are tricky in most games but unless there isn’t any IK in her legs, I think some more accurate collision would have helped.
I also need to mention the final scene of the game. I think I get it, but it was ambiguous and confusing. That rarely rubs me the right way in any media and it left me a bit frustrated here as well.
Conclusion
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice isn’t a bad game. It has a great central character, an interesting premise, and some excellent technology behind it. While there are some polish issues I have minor gripes with, the biggest thing I kept thinking as I played was that I wanted to skip over a lot of the puzzles and half of the combat because I was bored and not enjoying myself very much. It felt as if the focus of this game was Senua and bringing her and her struggles to life. This came at the expense of the gameplay itself.
Would I recommend Hellblade? Probably. I’m glad the game exists, I am glad I played it, and I’m thankful for the work Ninja Theory and Epic Games did to take techniques and plugins that were used in Hellblade and make them available to all. It is also a showpiece of what small experienced teams can do with Unreal. I had high expectations, and perhaps that is what let me down a bit.
I consider Hellblade a flawed experimental game that needed a bit more time in the oven.
Dan