Monday, January 28, 2008

[Pre]Review: Heavenly Sword

So I know it is an older game to most of the PS3 community, but GameFly delivered a nice little copy of Heavenly Sword to my doorstop on Friday of last week and I decided to spin it up yesterday. Now please keep in mind that I have only put in around 45 minutes into the game.

Visuals: Pretty stunning, it is obvious that the developer Ninja Theory spent a lot of time to make this game look good. The main character Nariko is drool-worthy and my only visual complaint is her hair isn't perfectly modeled (which is asking to much anyways).

Audio: Alright a confession, I generally play my computer / console games with the sound turned way down because in general it is the gameplay experience that matters to me and not the audio, plus I find repetitive audio to drive me batty. So I don't feel comfortable other then saying the combat sounds were appropriate and the music didn't bother me.

Gameplay: So, this is your standard fight / adventure game. They have had these rough and tumble beat them up games since at least the NES (double dragon anyone?). Barring that it is obvious that Ninja Theory knows what they are doing for action games, the fighting is smooth and intuitive, and it is really fun to see some of the 'killing moves' even if they do get a little repetitive. It is a little but of a button masher, you could probably finish the game without ever learning any of the 'combos' that increase damage, but I'm having fun trying them out.

Overall: Now barring the fact that I have heard the game only consists of around 6-8 hours of gameplay that would put me roughly 10% into the game at this stage. Even so I believe I can accurately say that the game is enjoyable and extremely pretty but not necessarily a masterpiece. I don't know if I will finish the game, and I just have to say GameFly is a great service.

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1 comment:

Scott said...

I remember watching the demo of this thing. Its pretty intense. It takes a lot to take someone down and she was surounded in both fights I saw. Not at all hard on the eyes...that's for sure.