Announced at the same time as the Xbox Series X console, Ninja Theory’s sequel to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice promised a jump in visual fidelity that very few games could match. Now that it is here I think it is safe to say that the developers delivered.

The story starts off with the protagonist Senua, captured and bound on a ship. She’s there intentionally, hoping to find those responsible for taking her people. A violent storm hits and she is soon washed ashore and from there she has to not only navigate the wreckage around her but her own psyche which she still often at odds with.

What follows is a linear adventure with a number of combat and puzzle elements that doesn’t stray too far from the original game. Puzzles are mostly environmental and leverage both the pattern matching tricks done before with a couple of new tricks that open alternate paths. Gameplay run around fifty percent traversing the world with the rest split up between puzzles and combat. Timing is still a key part of combat, with understanding enemy patterns for blocking and dodging. The cinematic aspects have gone up a notch in creating some truly brutal looking encounters.

In terms of presentation, this is where the game can be considered truly next generation with some staggeringly good visuals. Both characters and the environments have a fidelity that that is leaps and bounds above its predecessor which even now is still a good looking game. Animation is really something to see and the use of motion capture makes those detailed characters really sell their parts.

On Xbox it’s all presented in a letterboxed form with additional black bars above and below – whether this is for improving performance or to further reinforce the cinematic experience, it does make for something a little different. There’s never anything that makes you feel like you are losing out from the reduced screen area, except maybe initially when transitioning from cutscenes to gameplay and not knowing when to take control again.

I think the best demonstration of how good the engine powering it (Unreal) is how you can pause at ANY time, even cutscenes, and use the photo tool to move the camera, adjust lighting and settings to take a perfect screenshot. It reminds me a lot of a similar tool that was part of the Matrix Awakens Unreal demo from a few years ago in enabling users to see up close every detail.

The sound continues to leverage binaural audio so use of headphones is highly recommended to experience the game as intended. Senua still hears voices in her head and the developers continue to play on that effectively. I just wanted to keep the headphones on all the time because the sound design is so good in this game.

Achievements in the game revolve around completing the story as well as finding a number of hidden items through the chapters. While the game does let you revisit chapters to find what you might have missed it’s not granular enough to pinpoint exactly where so expect a few repeated attempts.

Overall, whether Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is for you is going to boil down to your expectations. If you are a fan of the original and don’t mind games that are more interactive story than action game then you’ll enjoy it. The game takes less than ten hours to play through and if you liked it a lot there is an interesting option that opens up a replay that might also be worth a shot. Personally I enjoyed it a lot and found it hard to put the controller down until I reached the end.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is out now for PC and Xbox. Played on an Xbox Series X via Game Pass.