Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II review: From the motion-capture technology to the astounding recreation of Dark Ages Iceland, this game is cinematic both in scope and execution, PETER HOSKIN writes

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (Xbox, PC, £49.99 or included with Xbox Game Pass)

Verdict: Terrific, terrible beauty

Judgement:

Headphones on. You should definitely put on your headphones for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. The sounds pumped into your ears – from the left, from the right, from here, from somewhere over there – make up at least a third of the entire experience.

Actually, it’s not just sounds. They’re voices. They are the voices that occupy the head of main character Senua. She’s suffering from psychosis – after literally going to Nordic Hel and back in the first game in search of the soul of her deceased loved one – and, by extension, so are you. You hear the same whispered questions and booming warnings as they do.

It’s tempting to call this dazzling, captivating piece of audio design the “star” of this particular show – except there are other stars. One of these is the setting of Hellblade II, Dark Ages Iceland, where Senua has traveled to exact revenge on the entire community of Viking thugs who slaughtered her village and lover in the first place.

This Iceland is carefully modeled after the real Iceland – minus Björk and the overpriced booze of course. Thousands of photos were taken, scanned into computers and then recreated in the game. The results are astonishing. This land of mud and lichen, cold rocks and fiery sunsets is certainly one of the most impressive sights in all of gaming.

The makers of Hellblade II based their characters on something real: real actors (Melina Juergens seen as Senua) actually acting, shot – Gollum style – with motion-capture technology

Another star of the game is, well, the stars. As with Iceland, the makers of Hellblade II based their characters on something real: real actors actually acting, shot – Gollum-style – with motion-capture technology.

And so, like Senua herself, we really see Melina Juergens. Her performance is both amazing and terrifying.

It all adds up to something that is cinematic in both scale and execution. Purely as a blend of sight and sound, Hellblade II is hard to beat – you can really show off the capabilities of your Xbox and amaze your friends with the squidgy verisimilitude of its severed limbs!

But in a way that’s also the problem. As Senua struggles from beach to village to mountainside to… well – let’s just say – to some darker, stranger places, you can’t quite escape the feeling that more effort has gone into the cinematic grandeur of Hellblade 2 than in the moment when -moment-gameplay.

Take Senua’s signature superpower: sometimes she sees large, winding runes on the path ahead, blocking the way. At that point, the player must run through the environment and find parts of the rune in the landscape so that the path can be unblocked. It’s… fine, but little more than a punctuation mark on your journey.

Purely as a mix of image and sound, Hellblade II is hard to beat. You can really amaze your friends with the squid-like veracity of the severed limbs!

Then there’s the combat, which still feels a bit slow and random. Strike. Parry. Gets hit. It doesn’t seem to matter. Get up again. Strike. Parry. And so forth.

Of course, swishy sword fights might not be a priority for a game trying to offer a serious – and apparently well-researched – portrayal of psychosis and trauma. But what’s here isn’t a huge development over the original 2017 game; it’s more of a continuation of it, like a movie sequel. And it can be a bit of a slog.

Although maybe that’s the point. The struggling. As the voices in Senua’s head will remind you, nothing of value comes easily – and certainly not the bloody retribution for the murder of your poor old lover. Why else would mothers go to Iceland?