PS3 Hands-On: Heavenly Sword

Heavenly Sword is the best example right now of what the PlayStation 3 is capable of. New impressions!

Regular readers of Edge magazine will already be familiar with the hardships Team Ninja has gone through with its first PlayStation 3 game, Heavenly Sword. The studio has had to deal with a lot more than just the expected headaches the come with next-gen development, including the closure of their previous publisher. All of this makes it all the more remarkable that things look to be turning out so well for the game.

Some have compared Heavenly Sword to God of War, which seems both appropriate and unfair. Appropriate because the game delivers the same sense of visceral glee that David Jaffe's award-winning game does and unfair because it seems unfair to shackle the game in nomenclature before we've even had to chance to live the full experience.

What we do know is this: Heavenly Sword rocks.

Start with the action, which is simultaneously ferocious and controlled. You have a set of blades that you can use in various stances in destructible and interactive environments. The pace of the action is entirely at your command. You can fling your weapons at foes with abandon, smashing everything in your path, or you can take a more deliberate approach, using power moves to knock your foes down. You could do some fancy mathematics to find out how many moves there are in the game, but all that matters is that it's a lot of fun to play.

One of the more satisfying parts of playing Heavenly Sword is seeing the bodies pile up as you do away with enemies. And once they're downed, they're still of some use, as you can pick up their weapons (or even their helmets) to use as projectiles. Ditto for furniture strewn about. Destroy it and you'll have more items ready to be hurled at the next victim to enter the arena.

The game's protagonist is a lithe young woman with flowing red hair. You'll notice the hair, because it's constantly flapping about, drawing your attention away from the bedlam in front of you for a few seconds more than is good for you. If you do take the time to look closer, you'll notice the fluid animation that responds to the different stances you can assume. You'll also see through Sony's overreaching statements from last year and realize that anti-aliasing is not something we can count on, even in this generation.

But that's not so bad. Even at this early stage - the build we played was 50 percent complete - the graphics are near the top of what we've seen on Sony's new machine. While the polygon count is higher and there's more going on at once than before, what really knocks you is how much more realistic scene lighting is. If it looks like something should be casting a shadow, it does, and the light falling on textures brings us that much closer to reality. Extra horsepower is used for all sorts of small touches, such as puffs of dust that erupt into the air at appropriate times.

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That's not to say that everything is new. Like God of War, you'll occasionally be presented with sequences of buttons to press that carry out particularly devastating moves. It seems ripped straight from Sony's popular PlayStation 2 game and we're not too fond of it here either. Why go to all that effort to make a wholly interactive experience only to take you out of the action? What's worse, in our demo at least, it was a mandatory move for completing the stage.

Quibbles aside, Heavenly Sword is the best example right now of what the PlayStation 3 is capable of. Cynics would snidely agree, saying that all it offers is what we've seen on the PlayStation 2, only done with better visuals, and we can't completely disagree with that. It's hard to get an idea of what the full experience will be like, but at the moment Heavenly Sword is looking like one of the best games on the system, and we'll gladly admit a few dusty ideas.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo.com