Heavenly Graphics, but Hell on My Stomach

User Rating: 6.5 | Heavenly Sword PS3
Several months back I was introduced to Ninja Theory's work through Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Despite the plummeting price point typically indicative of gaming mediocrity, I found Enslaved wholly intriguing and masterfully crafted. After discovering that Andy Serkis had also contributed to Heavenly Sword's cinematic and narrative development I decided to immediately make a purchase.

Heavenly Sword took me about 6 hours to complete on the normal setting. 6 hours in itself may seem like a valid reason for lowering a review score, but (surprisingly) it does not factor into my scoring. I have always been a fan of quality over quantity. The problem is that the game ultimately falls into 3 hours of arena battle sword fights, 1/2 hour of arena/quick-time boss fights, 1/2 hour of cinematics, and 2 hours of sinaxis slow-motion cannon/arrow shooting.

For the most part, the characters are very engaging with strong individualized personalities and interesting dialogue. The narrative often falls more into bouts of witty dialectic than substantial plot driven revelations, but the presentation is so strong that it still draws in the viewer. Even 4 years later (with the exception of Nariko's squid-like hair) the facial features are stunning. Facial animations and expressions are still light-years ahead of another game I recently reviewed: Dead Space 2. The game's "menu" screen that opens after the first battle has some MAJOR lip synch issues, but these are corrected in every other cinematic. The scenes with Bohan yelling at his son (who looks like Sloth from the Goonies) and Flying Fox preaching his sadistic ideas about style while prancing like the Flash are definitely entertaining. The problem is that even 30 min of great cinema does not draw me back into the 5-1/2 hours that make up the rest of this game.

Almost every battle is broken into a room, arena, hallway, or enclosed road and does not allow you to progress until all enemies are defeated within that section. Environments are beautifully rendered, but ultimately all look similar in design and color. Enemies only come in about 6 varieties of soldier types. More importantly is that the only major difference when facing enemies is how often they block, how many hits they take to kill, and how often they strike with "unblockable attacks." Without exception enemies just don't feel unique like they do in other action games. The combat system also doesn't do much to keep the game from feeling repetitive.

The Heavenly Sword can be used in three different styles: Speed, Power and Ranged. Each style has its own set of combo attacks and by holding R1 (power), L1 (ranged) or no shoulder button (speed) you can combine combos with the square (regular) and triangle (hard) attacks. The game actually has a multitude of combos to use. The problem is that, despite changing the style, every combo is just a combination of square and triangle. So, depending on which style you use you are still using combos that look like [] ^ [] [] ^ or ^^^ or [] [] [] [] ^. When you don't touch any buttons Nariko will block a "blue" attack. Pressing triangle during an attack will trigger a lethal counter. Since you are stringing together so many combos only using a few buttons, you ultimately end up button mashing combos and keeping different styles in mind. A typical fight works like this: (L1 ranged- HAMMER DOWN THE BUTTONS, R1 power - HAMMER DOWN THE BUTTONS TO KILL THE POWERFUL ENEMY, roll away, roll away, no button for speed - HAMMER DOWN TRIANGLE TO HIT AND TRY TO INITIATE A COUNTER KILL). I'm sure that somebody could try to memorize each and every combo to try and use it in the best way possible, but it became an exercise in tedium for me. Mashing buttons while using different styles depending on the enemy type took me to the end of the game with only 2 deaths. Rolling to avoid "red" attacks also becomes difficult because you cannot stop a combo mid sequence. Pressing NO buttons to block a "blue" attack is almost ridiculous because you're almost always mid-combo on an attack when you see an enemy light up. Quite honestly all of the rolling, flipping, spinning and slicing through enemies began to make me feel nauseous. The environments, enemies, and attacks all seem so similar you lose focus on what you're doing and begin to see a blur on the screen. The sinaxis controls are even worse.

Now I know some people will love controlling the cannon shots and arrows with the sinaxis. The controls are actually decent using the motion controller and have a novelty to them. The problem is that the blur effect used around the object in flight, together with the slow-motion ups and downs of your path are UGGH...NAUSEATING. I have never felt like this in a game before, and dismissed several of the reviews here on Amazon that mentioned people feeling sick after these sections. Well, after about an hour of using the motion control I found it could be disabled and you could use the analog to steer. That helped a lot with the swaying to hit your target with motion control, but the slow-motion blur effect was still awful. The real problem is that the character you "usually" use for these sections (Kai- the mentally disturbed cat hat girl) can only shoot enemies or jump over them. The levels are extremely bare and offer only a few barrels to shoot with flaming arrows. You have to guide the arrow through fire and onto its target to ignite the gunpowder, which results in more boat rocking action.

The ending battle was the highlight of the action and was actually quite engaging. Aside from 2 very short sequences, it also didn't feature a string of 1 second quick time events to memorize like other bosses. Ultimately Heavenly Sword is best described as an experience with extremely tedious gameplay juxtaposed with AAA visuals and cinematics. Maybe it will be enough for you, but 30 min of great video was not enough for me to warrant keeping this game in my collection. I can watch any of the Lord of the Rings to see 3 hours of Andy Serkis doing some great voice acting and motion-capture. Ninja Theory is a very talented company, as my review of Enslaved notes, I just hope they keep diversity (and lack of motion controls) in mind for the reboot of Devil May Cry. (6.8/10)