Conclusion

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is a sequel that delivers a striking and emotionally intense experience—even more so than the first title. The game continues the story of Senua, a Celtic warrior battling psychosis amidst harsh Viking-era Icelandic landscapes. Gameplay involves puzzle-solving and combat, with puzzles reflecting Senua's mental state and combat being fast-paced, with good, but basic swordplay. I like that they removed the previous game's darkness mechanic and focused more on fighting, especially one-on-one to improve the experience. The story is decent, but the game is completely linear, and maps are small. There are no character development options, no skill trees, no equipment or other customization options—the game really puts the characters in the spotlight and their experiences. If you liked the first game, or the psychological horror theme, definitely check out Hellblade II. It is a fairly short game at a relatively high price though.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is built using Unreal Engine 5 and impresses with its visuals. It's easily one of the best-looking games ever released. Especially when it comes to rendering of the characters and their facial expressions, this is probably the best I've ever seen. The faces are unbelievably detailed and look extremely natural—these are not prerecorded video cutscenes, they are real-time rendered 3D models—unbelievable! Especially Senua's face and her agony is displayed in a manner so lifelike, that it really makes you feel her pain. The world environments are richly detailed, too, thanks to Unreal Engine's Nanite geometry technology, which pretty much eliminates blocky polygons—check out our screenshots. The map designers did a great job modeling the volcanic topography of Iceland and used excellent textures across the board. Objects in the world are well-built with lots of geometric detail, that includes indoor locations that often look quite poor in other games.

While there's no support for hardware ray tracing, the game uses Unreal's Lumen Global Illumination lighting, which is a shader-based rendering technique that approximates what ray tracing techniques do, by simulating the path of light rays as they bounce off surfaces and illuminate the scene. The game looks fantastic, so really no complaint about the lack of hardware RT. What I really, really hate though is the fact that the game throws so much post-processing at each frame, that the game becomes borderline unplayable in my opinion. There is film grain, motion blur, chromatic aberration and depth of field, all enabled, all the time, which results in an extremely unstable picture that made me dizzy and gave me motion sickness after around an hour of playing—and this never happens to me—horrible! On top of that you can't adjust the Field of View and the game has huge black bars on both the top and bottom that can't be turned off—WTF, if I want a "cinematic experience" I'll just watch a movie and not play a game. All movement in-game also feels very slow, almost like they wanted to make the game one hour "longer"—Cheat Engine Speedhack x1.5 to the rescue.

Senua's Saga has excellent support for upscalers: DLSS, FSR, and XeSS are supported. In terms of Frame Generation you only get support for DLSS FG, FSR 3 is not supported. It's also not possible to enable just Frame Generation, without DLSS upscaling, you have to enable DLAA at least, which is a reasonable compromise, but not the perfect solution. Skipping lines of text isn't possible in the cutscenes, and only some cutscenes can be skipped. "Compiling shaders" and stuttering has been a problem for many PC releases, but is a total non-issue in Hellblade II. While there's a short shader compilation stage when you first start the game, this takes only a few seconds and the results are cached, so subsequent game loads are much faster, unless you change graphics card or the GPU driver.

Hardware requirements of the game are high. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with the highest settings and no upscaling you need a RTX 4070, RTX 3080, RX 7700 XT or RX 6800 XT. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 3090 Ti or RX 7900 XT. 4K60? Not happening—even the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 gets only 57.1 FPS, and the RX 7900 XTX reaches merely 44 FPS. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a typical open-world area with vegetation and water, there are some locations that get higher FPS though. The game runs fairly similar on NVIDIA and AMD, slightly worse on Intel, but the differences aren't exactly huge compared to where we usually see the tested cards. NVIDIA's new Game Ready drivers released today offer a substantial performance boost of between 5 and 15%, so make sure to install those.

The settings performance scaling is good. You can gain roughly 50% extra FPS with just settings, and the funny thing is that the game still looks almost exactly the same—check out the comparisons on page four. While there's some pixel differences here and there, during actual gaming there's no subjective difference. Textures look great, models look great, everything is a blurry mess due to the post-effects. I guess this is the first game where I can recommend "play at lowest details" if you have a weak PC. On the other hand this means that the settings scaling is extremely unbalanced and the developers failed at their job. Settings should give you a meaningful choice, both in performance and visuals. As mentioned before, all the upscalers are included, so it should be possible to reach 60 FPS no matter the hardware you have, plus there's Frame Generation.

Our VRAM testing shows that Hellblade II is quite reasonable with its memory requirements, especially when considering the impressive graphics offered. Interestingly, its VRAM allocation matches how much memory the game really needs, rather than inaccurate estimates as in many other games. At 4K we measured around 11 GB, and cards with 8 GB clearly see a performance hit, for example the 4060 Ti 8 GB vs 16 GB results. For lower resolutions 8 GB is plenty though. Once you turn on Frame Generation, the VRAM usage increases by 2 GB, like in most other games. For lower resolutions, the VRAM requirements are a bit on the high side, because even 1080p at lowest settings reaches around 8 GB, which could make things difficult for older 6 GB and 4 GB-class cards.

Overall, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is a fascinating game that could be much more enjoyable if the developers gave us a few more tweaks to the post-processing—maybe modders will fix it. Given the current player counts I suspect this is the last title in the Series and Microsoft will probably shut down the studio, like they did with others. I like that the game is DRM-free and works fine completely offline.