Heavenly Sword (PS3)

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

During Sony's bloated press conference at E3 2006 -- that 20-minute Gran Turismo demo will haunt all of us to our graves -- one game snapped us out of our collective stupor and made us sit up and pay attention. That game was Heavenly Sword.

It featured a woman wearing hot pants, standing at the bottom of a gladiator pit, elegantly dispatching a small army of bad guys, and doing it all with a tremendous amount of style. It was sexy. It was exciting. It was visceral. We officially had our first bona fide reason to want a PlayStation 3.

But in subsequent months, something strange began to happen: Each successive time we saw Heavenly Sword, it looked worse.

And worse.

Combat was janky. The formerly glass-smooth frame rate stuttered and stalled. That crisp, clean gameplay from the E3 demo? A distant memory. And suddenly, this goddess of war, this would-be female counterpoint to God of War's Kratos, despite her good looks, was getting ugly.

While the final product isn't the disaster it seemed to be on track to become, it's also not the transcendent third-person action experience Sony and developer Ninja Theory originally promised us -- which makes playing through the game, despite flashes of that former glory, an exercise in vague disappointment.

The game stars Nariko, who, like all videogame women, never wears an outfit bigger than a cocktail napkin, even during the game's snowy levels. The narrative and gameplay is built around a sword -- the eponymous sword of the title -- a huge, kick-ass piece of magical steel that Nariko must learn how to wield and not let fall into the hands of the nefarious King Bohan. Pursued by King Bohan, Nariko and her father, Master Shen, along with Nariko's eccentric sister, Kai, go on the lam. There's some nonsense about Nariko being a curse on the local clan, about her mother dying during childbirth, about whether or not the sword is truly magic, etc.

Mostly, all we needed to know was 1) go here; 2) beat the hell out of a bunch of bad guys. The game is divvied up into a series of discrete arenas. Henchmen drop into the arena. Nariko dispatches them. More henchmen drop in. Rinse. Repeat. Likewise, the controls are standard-issue third-person action: The square button on the controller doles out light attacks; the triangle is for heavy attacks; and the circle button handles specials.

To its credit, the game does bring something new to the genre in the form of three combat stances. A Speed stance, a Ranged stance, and Power stance. Switching into the various stances is handled by the L1 and R1 triggers.

It's possible -- scratch that; it's necessary -- to mix and match all three attack-types into the same combo string. Example: Open with a Ranged attack; switch to Speed; and finish up with Power. Swapping attacks is also essential to defense. When an enemy has a blue aura surrounding him, it means he's using a Speed attack, and the only way for Nariko to block his attack is for her to be in her Speed stance. If an enemy glows orange, he's using a Powered attack. If he glows red, that means his attack is unblockable and, as in God of War, you'll have to use the right analog stick to evade and roll out of the way.