The game has had some inevitable comparisons with God of War and its not hard to see why. The blades that the heroine, Nariko, wields are similar to the blades that Kratos does. The story is a bit of a vengeance action flick as well. A King and his forces have invaded the lands that are occupied by a warrior clan. This clan is meant to be protecting a precious artifact known as the Heavenly Sword. Long story short, Nariko, as the primary heir of the clan must take up the Heavenly Sword to fight off the many forces in her way and take back her land. However, this will come at a cost. The Sword is one that’s not meant to be wielded by “mortals”.
We are sure there is more to this but for now, that’s all we have. While the demo that we had to play was not a very long one, we were quite impressed by what we saw. This was even though we’d seen a lot of the elements in previous games. The demo started off with Nariko standing atop a cliff face and observing the goings-on with another strange character. Once we had control, we were left to walk up to a flashing icon attached to a couple of giant ropes. Interesting, the camera was being controlled by the Sixaxis motion controls and most other camera angles were fixed.
More action then you can swing a sword at.
We then descended along one of the ropes, while taking part in a quick-time event similar to those found in God of War and Resident Evil 4. Basically, we had to mash the X button to run down. As we got closer to the platform that we were aiming for, the enemies noticed our presence and began to cut to ropes. A few swift movements to the left and right were all that were needed to avoid plummeting towards our death and at the end, if we pressed the right button when prompted, would conveniently knock off the leader of the enemies.
This would help a great deal because the enemy leader could knock you out in a couple of swift blows. Otherwise, the combat engine in the game is incredibly impressive and potentially deep. The X button looked to be reserved for picking up and throwing objects, while the square and triangle buttons were your main form of attack. Stringing these two together would create a number of combos, which tended to differ, depending on your situation. Furthermore, the trianle was also in charge of administering well-timed counters. When used at the right time, the circle button unleashed some powerful grabs and finishing maneuvers.
Add in a roll/dodge with the right analog stick and your got a game similar to God of War, right? What Heavenly Sword adds are two stances that are activated whenever you hold down the L1 or R1 buttons. One is a power stance and the other is a long distance/ranged stance. As long as you are holding one down, you’ll execute those specific attacks. The beauty of this, is that you can string together combos using the different stance completely on the fly. Simply put, its awesome and holds a hell of a lot of potential. Put that together with a huge number of enemies and that gives you a lot of action.
Here comes the pain!
We’re not really bothered with the game’s similiarity to other games, because it looks like it will manage to add enough on top of existing ideas. If there were a couple of things that could be neatly fixed up before the final release it would be two things. Firstly, while Nariko’s movements were super slick, we felt that they could be slightly better aligned to the controller inputs. That, and while the game does have the God of War feel, Nariko’s attacks didn’t have the "oomph" or the destructive feel that Kratos had. However, the same could be said about Kratos in the earlier stages of his adventure.
Visually, the game is an absolute stunner. It was amazing to see all the intricate details come together so nicely. It’s also great to see that what we saw at last year’s E3 was not all fluff. Nariko and all the enemies are superbly animated and there is huge amount of variety in the attacks that you’ll see. Environments are incredibly detailed and destructible. The game looks like it just needs a few final coats of polish to finish it off.
If Sony are to clamber their way back from what is admittedly a slow start to this generation, Heavenly Sword will have to be the first step in that direction. From what we’ve seen so far, Heavenly Sword definitely has the potential to deliver the goods but again, we won’t know whether it does or not, until we play the final game. That, and the developer, Ninja Theory, are new on the block and will need to be careful that they're not falling into some beginners mistakes. Either way, this will hopefully be the first of many stunning actions games to come to the PS3 and the one of the first legitimate reasons to plonk down that hard-earned grand.
That's what the U.S date is now listed at, used to be August 4. Source: IGN.
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