Heavenly Sword (PS3)

Today's lesson, class: Tiny dress + big sword = tepid third-person action.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Truth be told, Ninja Theory borrows much from Kratos' playbook. They're no fools. Even the way the game's bosses are dispatched, with square-square-up-triangle-down moves, is lifted straight from God of War. And although Heavenly Sword tries very hard mix things up a bit with sniper-centric levels starring the oddball Kai, or destroy-the-catapault-with-this-cannon levels, at heart, the game finally can't help but be evocative of God of War, nor can it escape the long, ominous shadow of Kratos.

All games of Heavenly Sword's ilk require button-mashing. After playing God of War, the X-button on the office controller threatened to take out a restraining order against us. But in Kratos' superior game -- and it's impossible not to measure the two games against one another -- even in its most hectic moments, with enemies clogging the screen, every press of the X-button felt crisp, clean, and most importantly, purposeful.

The same simply cannot be said in Heavenly Sword. We spent far too much of the game frantically alternating between the Square and Triangle buttons, putting calluses on our thumbs and hoping that the fight ultimately came out in Nariko's favor.

Sometimes it did. And sometimes it didn't.

There seemed to be a slight disconnect between what we were doing with the controller and what Nariko was doing onscreen. Sometimes she pulled off the most amazing feats, slaughtering enemies with the greatest of ease; other times, Nariko was knocked off her feet by a diminutive bad guy for some inexplicable reason.

Neither situation seemed to correlate one-to-one to what we were doing with the controller. And for a third-person action game, this kind of disconnect is the kiss of death.

We wanted to love Heavenly Sword. And we tried. Oh, how we tried. Despite some genuinely remarkable cut scenes -- produced by Peter Jackson's Weta Digital in New Zealand, and directed by Andy Serkis (who also does King Bohan's voice acting) -- and some truly exciting moments, in the end Heavenly Sword's muddled gameplay (which at times veers dangerously close to being tedious) and botched Sixaxis moments doom this once promising enterprise.

Nariko: We'll always have E3 2006, baby. No one can ever take that away from us.

This review is based on a retail copy provided by the publisher.