Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is gaining up traction in terms of hype as well as development. The game by Ninja Theory, the guys behind the reboot of Devil May Cry and Odyssey, have been ambitious about creating a game with narrative depth and Hellblade is seeming nothing short from it, with the efforts put into the facial expressions and the atmosphere of the game. Ninja Theory released their latest Development Diary video, which focuses on the combat aspect of the game and even though, it is extremely early to talk about the game, we thought we would give an opinion on the game’s combat system. Below is the video that was released by the video:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aAgBAO9Lwc]The video shows off a very small part of the game where Senua is just fighting some goons (I dunno what to call them). As far as the visuals go, I would say that some of the aspects of the game look stunning, for example, the environment is pretty damn awesome but the area that it lacks is the hair of Senua, it looks too rigid for hair that long.
Talking about the main focus of this video, the combat. The combat has been motion captured for most realistic in-game movement as you will see in the video and it has been implemented pretty nicely. The combat mechanics of Senua do seem like an intermediate between the Witcher and the Dark Souls franchise. Some elements of the pirouette are there while there are some neat dodge mechanics as far as we can see. The targeting system has been emphasized on a bit in the video, but doesn’t seem anything out of the ordinary. We will come to know more as more developer diaries come out and we get to see more gameplay.
The necessity for less HUD has also been focused on and they have explained how they have tried to base the whole gameplay around visual indications-from Senua’s expression on getting hit to post-processing effects to showing injury on enemies to depict health. They have compared it to an action movie where everything is based on visual indications. As far as we can see, it might be difficult to actually make this a practical implementation because many gamers will just slash the enemy till it breathes it’s last because it may be tedious to actually determine the health of enemies simply through cuts and wounds.
Well, this is what we think about the combat system of Ninja Theory’s latest game in development. It is in a very early stage of development, but still worth talking about, just in case the developer comes through this piece and decides to do some fine tuning. What do you think about the combat system of Hellblade? Let us know in the comments below.