Senua's Sacrifice was a masterpiece in my eyes for many reasons. While I couldn't literally connect with Senua's story and struggles, I was able to sympathize with her far more than almost any game protagonist and feel her pain, especially dealing with psychosis and how that seriously impacted her. That ending sequence still lives in my head rent-free thanks to the sheer impact and power of its futile war against overwhelming odds.

It's part of that love for the first game that leads me to feel that Senua's Saga, while far from a bad game, is a major downgrade from the previous entries.

In the spirit of fairness though, I need to draw attention the visual and auditory feast that Senua's Saga manages to execute perfectly. Barring a few technical issues and the rather annoying black bars you can't turn off, this is one of the best-looking games I've ever played. The ability for the game to switch between cutscene and gameplay with such elegance is an achievement. I know that's been known about since the 2021 trailer, but the fact the entire game uses it is insane.

I also have to give praise to the reduced focus on combat, even if for many people that is a downgrade. Hellblade is all about its narrative and visual strengths, so having the combat be more about its spectacle than any in-depth systems is ironically appreciated.

However, I can't say the same about the puzzles. Where Senua's Sacrifice had puzzles that were a bit more in-depth, all of the puzzles in Senua's Saga I had done within a few minutes, only a few moments to understand what they needed. If anything, they're more of an obstacle to progression that doesn't provide much narratively or visually. Even when it does, it never feels like puzzles were necessary to get the point across.

The story is also notably more uneven this time around. While I can praise how NPCs help Senua navigate her relation to others while dealing with psychosis, some conversations are often left one-sided with answers given by the Furies in Senua's head, but not by Senua herself. While some parts of the game are paced perfectly, some story beats take either far too long or are rushed too quickly without proper resolution. While certain characters are written well, others can change opinion rather unrealistically. It's all very flip-floppy and can cause the experience to feel rather disjointed. I wouldn't normally care about story this much, but it's hard to ignore some serious faults when it's a major selling point.

It's such a shame since it's clear the level of passion that went into Hellblade 2. Its visuals are breathtaking every step of the way, its audio design is as great as its always been, and performances are once again top-notch. However, it feels far from a great successor to the previous entry thanks to some serious missteps along the way. While it might be a personal thing, the ending to Senua's Saga also doesn't hold a candle to Senua's Sacrifice no matter how pretty it can look.

I had no idea this game even existed until my recent dive into the world of Madieus Maximus, so to fuel my new autism special interest I immediately went out and grabbed it knowing next to nothing outside of the fact it's pretty well regarded and usually referred too as "underrated". Also that it connected to Fury Road in some way.


Well as soon as I booted it up I saw something as beautiful as whatever is inside the pulp fiction briefcase.

The Avalanche Studios logo. To help with the context here, go ahead and check my top 5 favourite games of all time on my profile and you'll see a little game on there called Just Cause 3. A beautiful open sandbox game that has brought me endless replayable fun over the past 10 years, made by none other, than Avalanche Studios.

The absolute smile that came across my face when I saw that logo, I knew I was in for a good time and I was sure as shit not wrong.

I can 10000% see why people call this underrated, this definitely deserves so much more attention.

Did it blow my mind? No.
Did it reinvent my ideas on what a video game should be? No.

But fuck me, this is so goddamn fun throughout.

It is the most solid 4 golden star game I have ever played. Everything about it is just fun to do with a beautiful polish over it all.

The story is absolutely nothing special but still a great time especially if you're into the world of Mad Max and I love how it really does add even more context to Fury Road. No spoilers for this 9 year old game of course.

But the gameplay never got old. It's very similar to Just Cause in a lot of ways, mainly in that they drop you into this big open world and just let you go fucking nuts.
All of the customisations and weapons you can get for Max and his car just makes you want to do everything, every side mission, every camp, every nook and cranny explored to get everything you possibly can so you can rule the wasteland. The game rewards your curiosity incredibly, every corner you turn is something new to find.

Honestly it's hard not to just fangirl over so much of this. Just being able to explore the wasteland and stuff like Gastown and seeing a whole new side to it from the movies is just, mwah. Especially with how beautiful everything looks, I think this game genuinely looks better than a decent chunk of recent stuff.

Genuinely my only complaint would be that you can find and unlock a decent chunk of other cars but there's no real use to them outside of Death Races. Especially when you start upgrading the Magnum Opus properly why would you wanna use the other cars? Just a bit odd.


But honestly I cannot recommend this enough, especially if you're getting into Mad Max with all the recent hype. Again it's not gonna blow your mind or anything but it is just an absolute solid good time that I more than happily got sucked into for hours at a time.

I am definitely going to come back soon and platinum what's left cause to be honest I already did most of the random pick me up quests just because it was all so fun.

Nothing changed about the game in the YEAR AND A HALF it was gone, except for the addition of three new characters and three new premium currencies. The game is still painfully buggy, with painfully slow combat, and frustratingly unbalanced characters.

Keep all of that in mind when I say this game is so damn fun! I am in love with the roster, there are just so many fun characters to play as! Tom & Jerry is my main, but I’m also great at LeBron James and Superman! Even the characters that I don’t play are so well made that I have to respect the work put into them! Also, the fact that Game of Thrones has a rep at all is still hard to believe, but I desperately crave a character that ISN’T my least favorite character in the show.

Anyway the single-player mode is mediocre and I just found out that you can’t even train with characters before buying them anymore and that’s STUPID! Don’t support this nonsense! Don’t give Warner Brothers a dime!

But also you should play this game because it’s actually pretty fun sometimes. I also have stocks in Warner Bros so I want this game to perform well…

Can y’all tell I’m conflicted?

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was a game that I really enjoyed due to how unique the audiovisual design was. Yes it wasn't perfect, the combat and puzzles were especially tedious and really repetitive. Now 7 years later we finally got the long awaited sequel called Senua's Saga: Hellblade II and luckily the Devs said in a Developer Direct that they improved the biggest complaints which I've mentioned above. And they really had to improve the mechanics from the first game because Hellblade II being a sequel made it loses a lot of the uniqueness factor. So what did Ninja Theory improve exactly ? Tbh. almost nothing besides the beautiful graphics. The combat still consists out of the same four buttons prompts and the puzzles are also very similar. Sadly the puzzles are way easier than in Senua's Sacrifice and are almost no challenge. The only thing that they did change is the frequency of how often you have to engage in combat and solve puzzles. What did they replace it with? Yes walking. And when I say walking then I mean that there is a lot of walking. The first 40 minutes of the game are just walking and chapter 3 is basically just walking through a cave and lighting torches for an hour. This segment was just dragged out way too long and could have been a lot shorter. The voices inside Senua's head also weren't improved either, most of the time they are just a replacement for a UI where it tells you to look this way or to go that way. I just wished there was more to this feature besides that. The big selling point is obviously audio visual experience and yes the graphics are really beautiful. Same can be said about the smooth animations and the soundtrack. But besides that, that's about it. The story is less emotional captivating than one from the first game, I like that there are now side characters but unfortunately they were also pretty uninteresting.

Overall I can say that this is more of an art piece than a game and it can be really unpleasant to play for some people. I was also wondering what Ninja Theory did the whole time the last five - six years of development time. because the playtime is roughly five hours and these five hours you mostly walk around or watch cutscenes. There was also almost zero marketing which was weird because this is one of two big games for Microsoft this year. There might be two reasons for that, either they knew how short the game was and simply couldn't show more. Especially because there were two big "boss encounters" which were clearly the highlight of this game. The problem was that one of them was already spoilert with the announcement trailer 4 years ago. The other reason might be that Microsoft just simply didn't care and knew this game would flop. But it's also well known that Microsoft sucks at Marketing compared to Sony or Nintendo, so this wasn't a big surprise. If you look at the steam player count it peaked at roughly 4000 concurrent players which is bafflingly low. Yes this game is on gamepass which is where probably most of the players are coming from but that doesn't makes it better. I mean look at me for example, normally I prefer buying games, especially physical versions but I was already worried due to the lack of marketing and when I saw how short the games was I decided to play the game through Gamepass. I paid 1 € for one month but not just for Hellblade II, there are also 2 other games which I wanted to try, so I pretty much only paid ~ 0,34€. This worries me heavily after what happend to Tango Gameworks and Hi-Fi and I fear that Ninja Theory will be probably the next Studio on Microsoft's chopping block...sadly because you can clearly see how much passion the devs have. But I can't recommend playing this game throug gamepass and even less for ~50€ because gameplay-wise it's almost exactly the same as it's predecessor and a great example for a game with graphics over substance. This would have been better off as a tech demo to show off the powers of the Xbox console similar to what Sony did with Astro’s Playroom.The game ends so suddenly after teasing another big set piece(the third giant) that I can't stop feeling disappointed.

Games I finished in 2024 Ranked

Parkour in video games will never not be incredibly fun.

It's disappointing that only the Uncharted and Tomb Raider reboot series offer such a rich blend of action-adventure and platforming elements, as they are such a joy to play. As a kid, I loved jumping straight into a game and being greeted with immediate, thrilling gameplay—no bloated opening cutscenes or overlong tutorials. While I do enjoy cinematic games that tend to prioritize graphics more than anything else, it's also nice just to dive into the spectacle of pure gameplay. The Uncharted series nails this with its exciting parkour mechanics that keep you constantly hooked on the screen.

I'm so happy they took everything from Uncharted 2, one of the best in the series, and enhanced it in every conceivable way, delivering yet another action-packed, over-the-top experience. The visuals and environments are stunning, and you can truly feel the passion Naughty Dog poured into this game.

While the story and characters in Uncharted 4 are phenomenal, the combat falls a little bit short. The gunplay never felt better, and it's fun to shoot enemies, but at certain points, it started to feel more like a chore rather than something I was actively excited about, mainly because it became a bit too repetitive. Luckily, the platforming and traversal make up the vast majority of the game.

At its core, Uncharted 4 offers a perfect conclusion to the Nathan Drake adventures, delivering entertaining gameplay that is truly the spectacle of the game and proves that cinematic games can be more than just good graphics. This nearly 10-year-old AAA game is more enjoyable than many cinematic €70-80 games that forget to prioritize fun nowadays.

So no shade to The Last of Us, but I hope Naughty Dog's next game—hopefully not another remaster or remake—will actually have fun gameplay again.

Back in the day when Darksiders initially came out, I was a big action game fan (still am). I loved my DMCs and God of Wars, and so with the combat that Darksiders did have, my expectation was a cool action game but based on the Abrahamic religions as it's backdrop. Instead I got a semi decent action game, but filled with puzzles, dungeons and exploration. I wasn't a big fan of Zelda back then and I thought the puzzles/exploration were boring. I just wanted to fight stuff. So by time I got to the final dungeon, I was overwhelmed and just quit the game.

Fast forward to today, Zelda is one of my favourite franchises of all time. I love the classic Zelda formula of dungeons, exploration and puzzles. So I thought back about how Darksiders was basically a Zelda game with an Abrahamic lore, and wanted to give it another chance with my new Zelda-liking mindset.

Darksiders is a great Zelda clone. It is pretty much an Arbramic Ocarina of Time where it follows the same formula. You explore an overworld, solve puzzles dungeons to get new items that help you defeat bosses and gain access to new areas in the overworld. The more you explore, the more upgrades you will find that will make you stronger etc etc. It's not so different from Ocarina Of Time, you even get a horse.

The one thing that does really separate Darksiders from a Zelda game, besides the setting, is the combat. Zelda combat is usually nothing to write home about, and serviceable. Darksiders takes note of the action games from those days, like DMC and God of War and kind of melds it's combo focused action with Zelda's -targeting system. It works, and quite fun to play, but it's not as mechanically deep DMC or God of War. It feels more like an enhanced OoT combat system, although there isn't much enemy variety so towards the end of the game it starts to feel quite repetrtive


I love the post apocalyptic modern setting, which definitely helps separate itself from the fantasy medieval setting of Zelda to offer it's own unique experience. The lore is quite good, especially if you are familiar with any of the Abrahamic religions, it takes concepts and events and twists it to it's own dark universe. You can tell they really want to set up a larger universe with multiple games, just from this first game which was ambitious of the team and (almost) delivered.

It's not a masterpiece like Ocarina of Time, but it does what it sets out to do very well. Nothing here is ground breaking or innovative. It's just a great all around Zelda clone, which I'm glad I revisited to give a second chance.