Hellblade's combat is ok

Spoiler for the last stretch of the game, for those who care. I'm enjoying the combat system for what it is, the animations are fluid and smooth and can be both cancelled and linked at any times, landing parries and finishers feels meaty and is overall satisfying, I'm just annoyed there isn't more to it than that. The game barely tells you the extend of your combo chains so I found a few by myself (ie. light - light - heavy - light - light - light which will perform a cinematic finisher followed by a flurry of hits, this also works for heavy - heavy - light, etc., Running heavy - light does the same, but that's all I found so far.) Enemies are rather docile and stay idle in the background (kung fu movie-style) even on Hard difficulty, you also fight maybe 3 of them at once tops throughout the game. Speaking of enemies, there's only a handful of them: dude with a sword, buff dude with a mace, buff dude with a mace but he has a shield now, slow fatty with a giant axe, and some dude wielding two axes. That's about it, not counting the actual end-level bosses of course. Your tools to deal with crowd control are limited, sometimes you'll see your sword going through two enemies at once but only one of them will get hit, I guess that makes sense as the game is more focused on 1v1 fights, but it's still annoying. You can also activate Witch Time (Focus?) once it's fully charged which will slowdown time and put you into an invinciblity state for a few seconds. You have a couple guard breakers, a light attack, a heavy attack, 3 running attacks, various dodge attacks into a light or a heavy depending of the evade direction, and then a bunch of heavy charge attacks (you can chain a light into a heavy charge, followed by another light into another heavy charge, etc. each charge attack leading to a different heavy combo ender). You can chain a parry into 3 different attacks, light, heavy and melee, or you can perform one of the 3 running attacks instead, whatever strikes your fancy, this is mostly contextual depending on whether you judge you have enough room to do a longer attack. You can dodge and block. You can perfect parry some attacks, too. That's about it for the combat system, rather shallow but it feels ok. The voices in your head will cheer you on when fighting dudes, they'll tell you when to dodge, when you're about to get hit from behind, or if you have to activate the slowmotion skill to debuff enemies whenever they enter an invincible mist state, although parrying them will debuff them as well I think. I don't know if I should recommend Hellblade or not, as the vast majority of the game isn't about fighting at all. I would describe Hellblade as a walking sim ASMR where you spend most of your time solving environmental puzzles, like the ones you see in The Witness (not the connect the dot puzzles, more like the "align shapes you find in the level design to form runes" puzzles instead, if you know what I'm talking about). So you spend most of your time walking through empty areas, listening to stone audio logs about vikings, looking for clues in the environment in order to progress, then at some point you reach a very obvious open arena space where you fight half a dozen enemies, then you go back to exploring, and there's a boss fight at the end of each level. Senua freaks out, there's a blackout and you repeat the whole thing. I haven't beaten the game yet so I don't know if you get to unlock some sort of Bloody Palace arena where you fight wave after wave of enemies. I really doubt that's in the game, so I kept a save file right at the beginning of the video you're watching right now as this seems to be the only place in the game where you get to fight multiple waves of dudes one after the other (read: the only place where it feels like you're playing an action game.) So anyway, I'd say the combat is surprinsingly decent, imagine a dumbed down For Honor. I wasn't expecting much from Ninja Theory but the gameplay is miles better than what they did with Enslaved. I don't really care much about the story, the psychosis and horror elements are rather tame (there's not enough reality-bending mindfuckery for my taste), I also think that recycling the Nordic viking lore as backstory is kinda lazy, they could have taken the same legends but changed the Gods names and it would have been the same, I guess they went with it just for the Runes aesthetics, or as some sort of shortcut for the writing process. I don't know. Overall, it could have been worse but it's ok.