Our Most Wanted Games of 2024 – #5 Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2

thesixthaxis.com:

As we head into the top five of our Most Wanted games for 2024, and we have what has become one of Microsoft’s most important upcoming games – Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II.

Senua’s journey has taken her to Iceland for the sequel, and she has more horrors and demons to face. From gameplay reveals, we’ve seen fights against towering trolls, trekking through desolate and haunting landscapes, Vikings, and of course battling her own personal demons.

First announced alongside the Xbox Series X design reveal at The Game Awards in December 2019, we’ve only had occasional glimpses at how this game has been progressing in the four years since then, but each has looked quite exceptional.

While the original game was created by a small team of around twenty developers, leaning into an “independent AAA” style and constrained budget, Hellblade 2 is a much grander production, now applying state of the art performance capture – Senua actor Melina Juergens has been in combat training to make the combat animation look as realistic as possible – using the real Icelandic scenery for sound and photogrammetric capture, Unreal Engine 5’s latest bells and whistles, and aiming to make the most of the Xbox Series X|S consoles and top tier PCs.

And that’s part of why Hellblade 2 is so important for Microsoft. While Ninja Theory had various successes and a growing reputation as an independent studio, it was really Hellblade that put them on the map for a lot of gamers. Joining Microsoft in 2018 at the start of the company’s acquisition spree, we’re still waiting for that early batch of studios to really deliver big budget games – Bethesda carried the torch a lot in 2023, while Obsidian’s Pentiment and Grounded were smaller projects while we wait for