Heavenly Sword

I get the feeling Heavenly Sword is meant to be Sony’s big spring blockbuster for the PS3. While is isn’t going to sell consoles like Halo 3 has for the 360 it’s still a solid game.

The game sits firmly in the Slash-a-thon-hack-fest genre that is epitomised by the God of War games. I bring up God of War for two reasons, firstly it’s the benchmark when it comes to slash happy kill fests and second, because Heavenly Sword takes a few pages from the God of War play book, quite a few pages.

In Heavenly Sword you play as Nariko, a female warrior who suffers from the typical gaming female’s limited wardrobe. Luckily the developers avoided the temptation to also give her tits larger than her head. Instead she has about 3 meters of bright red hair. I’m not sure why someone who carries a sword around all day can’t cut her damn hair.

After a brief introduction that serves as the tutorial, you get your hands on the ‘Heavenly Sword’ which is really two swords almost all of the time. You can wield the sword in three modes, speed (two swords and do fast but pathetically attacks), power (one sword and wield it like a drunk with a 4 by 2) and ranged (God of War mode) .

The game play itself is pretty good. Having the three different styles mixes things up a bit and you can’t really get away with the traditional random button mash. The different styles work best against different enemies forcing you to use all three. You can also build up power by playing ‘stylishly’. Saving up your power lets you unleash a collection of instant kill moves that launch a pretty neat little cut scene. While this is cool the first time, they quickly get old.

You also get to play a few sections as a strange girl with cat ears and a makeup malfunction called Kai. There is probably some plot element to explain her strangeness but I didn’t really pay that much attention. She likes to play ‘twing-twang’, which sounds like it has potential but is actually just lame shooting. When shooting you can ‘ after-touch’ the arrows using the six-axis and guide the missile directly to your target. It’s kind of cool drifting an arrow into an opponent’s face, it makes the Kai sections very slow and ridiculously easy. So lets forget about her and get back to the slashing.

Like God of War, the game makes extensive use of ‘quick buttons’. The implementation here is a little harsh though. You generally get bugger all time to press the buttons and in several boss battles, failing to get it right means the boss gets a ton of health back and you get to do it all again. Beating the same boss into submission over and over again because you missed one button isn’t fun. Luckily later in the game the whole concept is pretty much abandoned and you get to go back to just bashing things. WIN!

The game has been widely criticised for being short. This is a bit of a blessing really. I don’t really like games that drag on for 250 hours, especially when 245 of those hours are mind numbing filler. While Heavenly Sword is short, probably too short, at least none of it feels like it’s there just to pad the game out.

The short length of the game means the story really doesn’t develop all that well and stay pretty shallow. But then you don’t really play this kind of game for the story.

Presentation is excellent, this is easily one of the prettiest games on the PS3. The voice acting and cut scenes are incredible for a game. It’s just a pity that the story doesn’t have any real substance to back up the excellent presentation.

Given how rapidly you can finish this one I recommend a rental.

DTN.