The Digital Foundry tech review.
As a story-focused game, characters and character rendering play a significant role in the presentation.
The expressions visible while engaged in combat or simply exploring really help bring the characters to life.
However, the realism is not achieved purely using detailed models.
Other engines and games are perfectly capable of such feats.
WhereHellbladeshines is from the art side.
The use of film grain and chromatic aberration also work in tandem to heighten the filmic presentation.
It’s just intended to be a soft presentation and I do think it works in this specific case.
That’s the look Hellblade goes for and I do think it succeeds.
So how does it manifest?
Firstly, there’s Lumen global illumination.
Shadows and indirect lighting update accordingly enhanced by the volumetric cloud sim above.
It just looks ‘right’ to the eye which is the power of high fidelity GI.
Feeding into the lighting is the heavy reliance on environmental effects.
Another effect that impressed me is the water - specifically the way it interacts with the environments.
Then there’s Epic’s next-gen geometry system: Nanite.
This is designed to allow extreme mesh density while virtually eliminating visible pop-in.
That aspect by itself is deeply impressive and contributes to the photorealism on display.
Nanite also helps the artists create large-scale scenes with minimal repetition and tiling.
The assets themselves rely on scanned photogrammetry assets based on various trips the team took during development.
I think this is more a limitation of manpower and time than anything else.
The real magic stems from the combination of all these techniques by the game’s artists.
However, the conversation around this target is more delicate and a matter of opinion.
Could the game achieve 60fps?
We’ll have more on the PC version in a follow-up article.
By duplicating this via recording with a head mic or some other technique, it helps create the illusion.
It’s remarkably immersive.
The overall audio presentation beyond the voices is equally impressive.
It’s a great fusion of UE5 and Ninja Theory’s talented art team.
Everything about the presentation feels polished to perfection.
Basically, Hellblade 2 is less of a typical game and more of something that washes over you.
I think the reason it doesn’t resonate with some might come down to expectations.
Most of your time with Hellblade 2 involves walking or watching.
