Heavenly Sword E3 2005 Impressions

Heavenly Sword is a new game from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for the Playstation 3, and while it doesn't look like it's going to break any new ground in terms of its genre--it seems to be a fairly straightforward one-against-many action fighting game--it is, like the rest of the PS3 titles on display at the Sony press conference here, incredibly impressive from a visual and graphical standpoint.

We don't have many details on the story, but the clip that was shown in the highlight reel shows a young woman--perhaps the Heavenly Sword of the title?--taking on a small group of soldiers and, well, completely demolishing them. She appears to be using a pair of swords similar in function to the blades that Kratos uses in God of War, with blades for slashing and an extension function for swinging enemies around when they're well and hooked. In addition, she also brings to bear environmental weapons, such as by kicking tables at her foes. What's more, there also appears to be some kind of aerial combat segment to the game, à la Dragonball Z, although this seems like it might be more appropriate for one-on-one duels or perhaps boss fights.

To wind down the demo, or perhaps to wind it up, the mysterious woman is shown destroying an entire army of foes with a single blast from a powerful gun/cannon flame weapon. While this is likely just a conceit for the purposes of the highlight video--any game that let you take down 10,000 enemies with a single weapon blast would have some interesting balance issues--it's still an interesting piece of footage, as it demonstrates the PS3's impressive ability to render hundreds of characters at the same time with little apparent loss of visual quality. If this represents the graphical capabilities of the system when it finally arrives, then we'll call ourselves impressd.

Stay tuned to GameSpot, as we'll have as many details on Heavenly Sword as we can possibly gather in the coming days.