CG writes: We spend around 40 minutes playing the opening of Hellblade II on PC (Gamepass version), running max settings but with DLSS set to Quality. So, effectively playing the game at 1440p despite the render res being set to 4K. As you can see, the RTX 4090 GPU sits around the 70% usage mark using these settings which are capped at 60fps. Aside from the technical details though, we found the opening gameplay a little underwhelming. Sure, audio is top-quality sublime, and UE5 provides some fantastic visual nuances, yet the gameplay just felt sacrificed for cinematic posturing. We are going to assume the gameplay becomes more of a focus moving forwards as the opening here felt less interactive that its predecessor which also begins in/on the water.
Issue # 399 of Edge Magazine has been released, and it features reviews for games including Hellblade 2, Still Wakes The Deep and more.
Sure, but I'm still skeptical tbh. Walking sims or mechanically-light titles like it *can* receive beneficial scores from them on some special basis.
I’m keeping an eye on Still Wakes the Deep. I’ve beaten a few games by the Chinese Room before. The premise sounds interesting. ‘The Thing’ on an oil rig.
I could not play fir more than one hour ... got bored and un-installed.
Back to GOW on ps5 to get a platinum oh yeah !!
The XBOX publishing team has failed on their exclusives. Those Exec and Senior producers should be canned.
Noppe only the Xbox loving sites giving it 10 and 9's. But they always giving Xbox games onrealistic high scores....
Metacritic and opencritic for this game is in the 80's so no they haven't failed anything. Unless all those Sony games that scored in the 80's are failures too
Nearly 90% of Xbox players who have started Hellblade 2 haven't made it through the action-adventure game's short seven-hour runtime to complete its story.
Remember when games were fun and entertaining and not just pretty graphics? That might have something to do with it.
Yeah, that's one thing thats wrong in the industry today outta many things. Heard someone on here on the Lego horizon game saying its a kiddie game same for astro and they'll pass on them. Like these games are fun they might appeal to kids more but they are fun for all ages. Theres a reason why Nintendo games sell better its because they are fun and thats what Nintendo is known for. I feel people forget to have fun but instead play consoles wars and graphic wars. They are a lot of indie games that are fun just like Nintendo games but people pass because how it looks etc.
Nintendo usually focuses on making fun games that also happen to look good or have great art styles. Astro Bot on PS5 is a breath of fresh air in an industry ruled by GaaS garbage. Good platformers are rare these days.
And I’m sure I’m in the minority but I think Lego Horizon Adventures looks more fun than the actual mainline Horizon games. 🤷♂️
The Lego games aren't any fun to me as they have copied and pasted the formula for 20 years but I do enjoy a good platformer that brings back the golden age of gaming.
GamerRN
DEATH STRANDING
on PlayStation (PS4)
Thanks for Everything
Complete Episode 14: Lou.
22.9% of players unlocked this.
So, more than double (above average) and it's a much longer game with a lot more content
Death Stranding
Main Story40½ Hours
Main + Extra60 Hours
Completionist113 Hours
Only kids under 10 and hardcore Lego fans like Lego games..
I think Guerrilla totally lost it to make such games. They could have outsourced the project and given us something more serious..
No matter how it turns, people will buy.
@cacabunga
Guerrilla is not developing the game. It's a licensed LEGO game using the Horizon IP but Sony and Guerrilla are not making it.
I agree. Every lego game feels exactly the same. And some of the "puzzles" are incredibly obtuse. Hard pass. I'll take the real deal over lego. That said, my kids are into the lego games, so they'll probably have me play with them until I start drifting off to sleep.
The graphics are so overrated. So much of the graphical budget just went to rocks and other lifeless backgrounds at sub 1080p and 30fps.
You look at Horizon:FW and birds are flying around animals are running around everywhere while you fight packs of robot-animals and it's all at 60FPS and 1440p+. I don't care what anyone says HFW looks better and plays much better. And it's a whole open world not just little scenes covered in darkness to they can maintain framerate's by not having to process anything distant.
And the game has a nothiness story because the first game didn't need a sequel. So, HB2 just seems forced, which is exactly what it was. HB1 was tied to Sony, so Microsoft just wanted to steal a sequel to not put on PlayStation. That's the only reason HB2 exists, so Microsoft could have a game with ties to PlayStation they could keep off PlayStation, simply the most petty of possible reasons. And it shows.
That's what I said, the Lego horizon looks fun more then the OG. Not to say the OG isnt fun but its just I dont have the engagement idk what words to put it. I know returnal and other house marq games and isomniac games had that feeling of fun and engagement
I spent almost 150 hours on the HZD + Frozen wilds so I don't really get what you're saying. The reason I still have yet to sink more time into Forbidden West is because I still want to 100% the Frozen Wild trophies and I have been loving the time I spent with the game.
@badz
I think you'll love Forbidden West and Burning Shores as it just improved on a lot of things in HZD and Frozen Wild. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely enjoyed HZD and Frozen Wild, but HFW and Burning Shores was the icing on the cake. I hope they keep up the momentum for the next game.
Agree I recently replayed earthbound and fell in love with it again it's a basic looking SNES game but the gameplay and charm just gets me and really reminds me games are not about pushing pixels they should be fun and if they can also bring Joy that's great.
There's far to many games dealing with dark and dreary overly emotional depressing games like hellblade 2 that barely let you play the game.
I want fun more than anything these days
Or it's been a walking simulator majority of the time might have something to do with it as well. The user review scores on metacritic.com mentions that as well
So silly... The game was released on gamepass to millions of people... Use the math side of your brain and not the fanboy side.
Nearly 90% of Xbox players ----->who have started Hellblade 2<---- haven't made it through the action-adventure game's short seven-hour runtime to complete its story.
An Amazing Number of Players Have Marvel's Spider-Man 2's Platinum Trophy
https://www.pushsquare.com/...
According to current Trophy data, 20.3 per cent of players have earned the sequel's Platinum gong.
Over half of players have completed the main story — 58 per cent to be precise — which, again, is unusually high, but for a fifth of all players to stick around and complete all the districts and side content too is pretty astounding.
Still, a 20 per cent rate for the Plat is ridiculously high. As far as we can tell, the next highest first-party Platinum rate is for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which is currently at 12 per cent.
Most Sony exclusives have had a higher than industry average of 15-20 percent of their players complete the game both God of War's, Ghost of Tsushima and all three Spider-Man games as well as both Horizon games have fallen into this bracket, and they are much longer than 6 hours.
Edit: oh and btw HB2 wasn't even that popular on xbox, the game peaked at something like 23 most popular game
‘Hellblade 2’ Launches As The 23rd Most-Played Xbox Game, What Does That Mean?
https://www.forbes.com/site...
Hellblade II peaks at under 4,000 concurrent players on Steam
https://gameworldobserver.c...
Millions of gamers not playing the game. How are you arguing FACTS?! Lol.
10 million people could have downloaded it. That would mean only 1 million of that completed it. Do you even know MATH?!
When your story can be completed in one sitting and nearly 90% still didn't complete it, it doesn't bode very well.
I'm taking my time with it. I know it's a short game and all. I've been playing it at a half hour to an hour at a time before I go to sleep. I work pretty early so I can't spend all night playing. I think I'm pretty close to the end.
Was about to say that. It's almost as if people got bored with nice visuals and didn't find the game fun enough to continue.
The times we live in are sad compared to the golden era I was lucky to experience 30 years ago. Games were fun and were made to be played, not watched. Now all the big publishers and console manufacturers seem to be only able to discern two game genres. Multiplayer focused online game and story driven single player games.
Where are gameplay driven games?
I have more fun in VR while playing small indie games than I do playing big "story driven" AAA flat games.
To each of their own, but for me, fun and gameplay are the most important. Then amazing visuals. And then music and sound design. And then maybe humor and only on the last place - the story. I can get good story cheaper and more convenient. This is what books and movies do better. Especially with that stupid trend to pursue realism in visuals. One more hardware generation and it will basically be a movie rendered in real time. For 70€ and with "gameplay" instead of gameplay. And then those same clueless idiots will survey young gamers and conclude they only want competetive online multiplayer games.
I mean, I played River Raid the first time and within seconds I knew I want to play games.
A guy who never played anything besides multiplayer games, will check one of those interactive movies and walk away, seeing nothing interesting in it. For us, veteran gamers, visuals may be impressive cause we know the limitations. But for some newcomer? They have no idea about the CPU or GPU limitations. They will just see a weird looking "movie" with boring and lacking gameplay design and mechanics.
I'd like to say Nintendo will keep supplying good, big budget games focused on gameplay, but Nintendo is just a name of a corporation. When the old staff leaves...
Anyway. I sure hope Mario Kart 10 won't have any stupid career mode with 300 minutes of cut-scenes in it.
Usually games like that are launch games. Designed to showcase what a system can do. I’d honestly love to play HB2 but the digital only release blows.
I suspect Game Pass has something to do with this also. Being less financially invested in a product is a sure route to not caring enough to complete it. Also indicative of the audience that occupies Xbox, they bought the wrong studio for their platform. Which again will hurt Xbox.
By this day and age where even one-person indie dev can make stunning looking game.
It's time for them to re-examine and sorting out their priorities they could easily have the best of both worlds nowadays but nope still obsesses over at chasing photo-realism spent years over that just for one game and they lose the ability to make fun interactive and entertaining games.
The stupidity of the people present on this thread is absurd... trolling simply because this is a Microsoft game.
I just have to say this...
"Video games are enjoyed by millions of people around the world. The one thing that most of these gamers have in common is the failure to finish games. Industry experts estimate that a new game will only be completed by 10 to 20 percent of its players."
https://eu.indeonline.com/s...
(do trolls realize that their favourite games from their favourite plastic box are only completed by 10-20% of players)
Even then it's still a head scratcher because it's really quite short. I think its just lacking severly in gameplay. Its a sometime pretty art piece... sure
Looks like just PlayStation his have 80 percent or more who never finished them... Speaks more about the state of games these days...
You'll be surprised by the percentage of ALL players who never finish games. I remember seeing an article about the shockingly high percentage of people who never finished Spider Man 2.
"Diving deeper into the stats, we can see that only 52% of Hellblade 2 Xbox players made it past the first boss and unlocked The Next Sign achievement. You encounter Hellblade 2's first boss after about 30 minutes"
90% of players didn't beat the story and only about half beat the first boss. This is just baffling to me when you take into account how short the game is. Just, wow
I picked up The Order 1886 for $20 and played it around Halloween. It was good and I enjoyed it, but yeah not perfect by any means. The visuals were nuts.
In actually just picked up the order last month and man did it's time it was not judged fairly game is amazing
Yeah, that game was legitimately good and the story was going places plus the setting was fantastic.
And it was a really early gen game too, not like HB2 which is a mid gen game.
The crazy thing is this isn't even new. This has been a growing issue since gen 7. There have been countless great games where if you look at the trophy/achievement data only like 30% or less of players actually finish any games they play. It's kind of insane. I can sort of understand with open world games where player fatigue kicks in, but plenty of linear games like this never get finished. It's like players start games and then just move on to the next thing a week later.
While this is true for a lot of games, it's even worse when you consider how long Hellblade 2 is. I understand if a game is 20+ hours and you move on to something else a week later. But this game doesn't take a week to complete, it takes a handful of hours.
Agreed. Hellblade 2 isn't some extended experience. It can be beat in just a couple of nights.
A growing issue since Gen 7? It's probably not much different than before achievements/trophies started getting recorded tbh.
@Skuletor
I mean that it seems like the percentages have been getting lower over time since we've been able to track them.
Not baffling when you touch the game and realize it’s just a big cut scene. It’s not fun and it sucks so makes sense.
It's not that baffling. GamePass lets people pretty instantly click A on a game to start playing it, look at the graphics, say "whoa that's cool" and then go back to whatever multiplayer nonsense they usually play. You don't even need to download the game, you can just stream it for a sec. These numbers are a bit meaningless.
I do think being on GamePass was a major nail in HellBlade 2's coffin. Games on subscription services feel inherently valueless and I personally can never get into them.
This is the audience Microsoft has cultivated on Xbox.
I don't blame them for trying with acquiring Ninja Theory, but at this point, it's difficult to dispute that this is too little, too late.
You can't finish the game.. there is no "gameplay".
The funny thing is that the main character trained (in real life) for 2 years to fight with a sword, in a game where there is almost no fighting.
Ninja Theory outdid itself in Hellblade 2 with the photorealistic visuals and the unreal audio design, but why was the gameplay neglected?
Its a perfect game for Gamepass, i think this is what MS wanted from it to be. IMO spring 2025 PS5/Switch 2 release maybe sooner
its only perfect if the gameplay has something to say or do. turns out this game has neither. nice graphics though
I finished it and I'll start by saying the graphics are amazing!!!!! and I experienced and noticed absolutely zero bugs and ran into no issues with the game so it's highly polished.
In saying that, that's where my compliments end, I slugged my way through this game, thank god it was short.
The most on rails game I've ever played, didn't care for the story or the characters outside of the story for the first giant which I did like. For a game like this story and characters should've been everything and it just didn't hit, I didn't care at all just wanted to finish the game and experience the visuals, that's the only reason I persisted.
Puzzles were absolutely lame an amounted to either trying to find shapes or using land shifting bubbles, all of which were piss easy.
The fights are cool at first and look brutal but again very simple.
Basically no environment interaction besides lighting torches
Checking my last achievement only like 6% of players have finished the game which says a lot considering the length of it. I can't imagine a whole lot of people are playing this either.
Don't understand the higher reviews for this, outside of visuals the game isn't great if any anything it was a slog to get the 7 hrs it's took me.
Many perfect reviews only scores the graphics like the very "unbiased"(lol) reviews of DF and Eurogamer. But saying the gameplay and story is a masterpiece are a bunch of liars.
DF IS MS’s advertising arm. Eurogamer was purchased by IGN, which is a MS mouthpiece. so no surprises there.
Yea it's hard to disagree man, like it's really not a good game.
Since when did games get full marks along with other high scores just for visuals, it's reeiculous.
DF doesn't do reviews as far as I know....they do graphical analyses and ofc being the pixeljunkies that they are, they will absolutely love the graphical aspects of this game.
@storm if they're ms advertising arm then why do they still praise a game like Horizon to the heavens? doesn't pan out my man, but nice try my little pony.
@StormSnooper
The made up Microsoft positive publicity. Even fanboys don't believe those sites are Microsoft leaning.
Weird of them DF to do a game review when their job actually is to review the tech aspects of the game.
It came across as paid sponsored review at times.
Leave the bootlicking stuff to Eurogamer especially now that they got bought the writing is on IGN's wall.
I feel like John got that line crossed a lot I feel, he should start his own channel because the other two stooges and simps at Eurogamer and DF are holding him back a lot.
It's all so ironic coming from a guy who's all about gameplay and frame rate obsessed, many mentioned that they don't give the likes of The Order 1886 the same praise a lot of catches ifs and buts for that game.
I don't have to mention the insufferable Tom Morgan.
It seems like Ninja Theory really were trying to tell an emotional story more than make a game - and that's totally fine. I really miss games like this.
Its nice to see Microsoft venturing into "story game" territory when they quite literally never do so. Other than maybe Lococycle.
Damn, remember Lococycle? https://youtu.be/4uHTEDDVFF...
Order 1886 had graphics that were way ahead of its time. Also had excellent gameplay. But it was absolutely ripped to shreds in reviews based on the shortness of the game and some repetitiveness of some fights. For some reason those things don't apply to HB.
A fair comparison I must say. I will play Hellblade II when it comes to PS5 (provided it gets a physical release) as I can't help but think it's similar to the first game in respect of its shortcomings, and I still got something out of that 1st game (a platinum trophy specifically).
It still applies. The games is a high 6 to low 7. Game writers need access to do their jobs so they they don't follow any kind of criteria that would potentially cut that access.
@ripper
They're not applying it, but it applies when we the consumer actually pays for the product and plays it.
more tinfoil hat galore than youtube comments, insecurities run wild when your plastic box doesn't have the most impressive looking game anymore, not that I'm surprised
Not a single person is upset or even disagreeing that this game has the best graphics. So what are you talking about?
It's naive to think access journalism doesn't exist. Calling it "tin-foil hat" doesn't make it otherwise. If you have been on this world since 89, you would have surely come to this conclusion along with the conclusion that words like "plastic box" and "insecurity" expressed in this way tells us more about you than what my comment is actually about.
It does but there’s not very much of it. There’s a couple good action sequences but the rest it bland
@Ripper, I remember how that game was torn apart even before it was released. I played and agreed with much of the criticism, the end bosses were terrible the game was way too short. But the weapons, gunplay and graphics were phenomenal. Haven't played hellblade 2 but watching it, it looks like you walk on rails the take turns combat is a joke. The graphics look fantastic at times, saw her wadding through water in some underground cave with a torch, impressive. Wish NT would have focused more on bringing real combat/ movement to their impressive graphical presentation. 7 years for a 5-6 hrs game is absurd.
Yeah and considering The Order 1886 was actually a pretty competent TPS but walks and jogs around slays a few enemies one and a time with lame ass puzzles in HB2 is much more to their liking.
Something's fishy here.
I just played the first 3 hours.....the gameplay is extremely basic. Walk a path while you hear voices, then long cutscenes, a simple battle that is almost QTE....repeat.
I'll wait for someone to record the game and convert it to an FMV for the SEGA MEGA CD port.