"Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is the most beautiful and technically breakthrough game on Unreal Engine 5" - this is the verdict of the experts at Digital Foundry

Digital Foundry team conducted a comprehensive technical analysis of Senua's Saga: Hellblade II - the new game from Microsoft and Ninja Theory.

As always, the experts paid attention only to the technical component, leaving gamers and critics to judge about gameplay and story.

Here's What We Know

Digital Foundry experts believe that Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is the most beautiful game, which came as close as possible to the notorious photorealism.

The developers at Ninja Theory have cleverly utilised all the features of Unreal Engine 5 and the technologies that the engine supports, including Lumen, Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps.

Thanks to MetaHuman technology, all characters, including minor ones, and even those who appear in the frame only for a few seconds, look as realistic and detailed as possible, and, what is important, each NPC is different from its "colleagues".

The Lumen system provides global illumination and a believable play of light and shadow, making some Hellblade II footage hard to distinguish from live-action footage.

In addition, the game effectively uses HDR, and Nanite technology allows you to process a huge number of polygons without performance slippage and loss in graphics quality.

But the most important component of Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is fantastic sound, which, without exaggeration, can be considered the second main character of the game. Every sound in the action is perfectly positioned, whispers and voices in Senua's head are heard from different angles, at different volumes and with different tonalities. The sounds of nature are also above reproach!

As it was announced by the developers, the game does not produce more than 30 frames per second on Xbox Series, but thanks to the efforts of the studio, it does not cause discomfort - everything looks smooth and cinematic.

To learn about all the nuances of Senua's Saga: Hellblade II and whether this game is really so good, The allure of madness: Senua's Saga: Hellblade II review.

Source: Digital Foundry