Heavenly Sword

From the same people who made Enslaved, Heavenly Sword came out way back in the day near the launch of the PS3 and was touted as being a great example of how beautiful PS3 games could be. Otherwise it was mainly derided as a God of War clone, but any hack and slash with quick time events would be. Being a forebear to Enslaved, I was interested in seeing just how they compared. And it turns out, they're pretty much the same. Interesting premise, interesting story, not so great gameplay/execution.

For most of Heavenly Sword you take the role of Nariko (voiced by Anna Torv of Fringe), a vaguely asian girl with long flowing red hair that is constantly clipping through everything (aka passing through objects or her own body). She comes from a vaguely asian village and tribe that is in possession of the Heavenly Sword, a legendary weapon said to have come from heaven to defeat evil, but it comes with the curse that any who use it will eventually be killed by it. The evil King Bohan (Andy Serkis) seeks the sword for his own and so is hunting the last remnants of the tribe until he gets it. We join Nariko in the middle of the final battle, using the Heavenly Sword to cut a giant path through Bohan's army, but to no avail. The sword takes her life. Lamenting this, she talks to the sword in a kind of purgatory area that serves as a mission select screen and recalls the events of the past 5 days that led up to her death.

Very interesting, right? Unfortunately it feels like the story itself never really progresses after that. Nariko gets the sword, has to save her people, loses the sword, gets it back, defends her people some more, masters the sword and then dies. There are hints to a sequel at the end, but really, it more felt like it was just leaving things open ended enough that it could become a series if they wanted it to. Instead, what matters in this game are the characters. While Nariko and her father come across as mostly bland and a little stereotypical, Kai, the wispy slightly addled child who plays "twing twang" (aka shooting enemies in the face with arrows) who you also play as is wonderfully quirky and just crazy enough to be fun to watch instead of annoying. But the real stars of the show here are the bad guys, because all of them are so completely ridiculous in their own wonderful way. King Bohan flies between rage and malevolent humor in a wildly unpredictable way. The Flying Fox is such a stereotypical bad kung fu movie villain it's hilarious. Whiptail, a woman with snakelike features, is like a Hollywood actress that was rejected from the big time and so has agreed to a B movie monster flick. And Roach, the giant fat slightly deformed son of Bohan, is delightfully pathetic in almost every way and can manage to wring the most sympathy from you except for Kai. All are wonderful in their own completely overacted and overdramatic fashion.

But what about the game itself? As we saw with Enslaved, a great premise and story means little if you don't have the gameplay to support it. And sure enough, it seems the trend started with this game.

The combat itself is actually based around an interesting concept. You have three "stances". Your normal stance is a speed stance, where your blows and combos are based around doing normal amounts of damage at a fast pace. Press L1, and you go into your range stance, where your attacks do little damage, but cover a wide area. Press R1, and you go into your power stance, where your blows do great damage but are much slower and easier for enemies to interrupt. There are combos for each stance, some of which can break your enemy's guard if they're blocking and knock them to the ground where you can insta-kill them with the press of a button. However, the trick is that enemies also use the different stances (except for range), and you automatically block attacks, but only when you are blocking in the same stance that they're hitting you with. So they glow blue to indicate a fast stance, orange for power, and red for unblockable. In the latter case, you have to evade by flicking the right analog stick.

Here's the problem though. The game's mechanics and response times aren't fitted to the style of combat they're trying to get you to learn. Evading is a joke, as when you evade your character doesn't even move far enough to get a sword's distance away. Range stance quickly becomes useless as every goddamn enemy blocks every freakin attack. While you keep learning new combos for each stance, there's never any incentive to try them out as you quickly discover which combos break an enemy's defense the fastest so you can insta-kill them on the ground and then spam that combo. As practically every battle consists of you fighting like 10 enemies at a time, and enemies attack you randomly, it becomes nearly impossible to finish a combo without getting hit. Several enemies switch stances mid-attack, meaning you need to switch stances to block, but the period of time between them turning from blue to orange and hitting you is so fast that even if you hit the shoulder button on time you can still get hit just from delayed response times, meaning you essentially need to learn what that opponent's lead up to an orange attack looks like. But as each enemy has several different combos/attacks that vary randomly, and each one looks quite similar, especially when there's a crowd around you and it's nearly impossible to see the lead-up, battles becomes more tedious than intelligent. I'm sure if you took the time to master the combat, learn all the combos, memorize enemy patterns, etc. that combat would flow like no one's business and you'd kick ass like it feels you should be able to. But for most players that is simply not going to be the case. Basically it's too unforgiving in its own rules and consequences, which makes combat frustrating instead of fun.

Now, being a near-launch title, before they figured out that trying to manipulate a game using six-axis was a bad bad idea, there was a heavy emphasis on six-axis controls, especially when playing as Kai. Essentially, you shoot an arrow, and if you hold down the shoot button you can guide that arrow in slow-mo to your target using six-axis. And maybe I just suck at six-axis, but these sections were some of the most frustrating parts of the game, especially when Kai has no standard attack button, but must plant herself, enter aiming mode, and then shoot to attack the crowd of enemies running at her. When it works right, it works wonderfully and satisfies that part of any gamer that giggles when you carefully aim an arrow into someone's head. But for the most part these sections seem more tacked on to exploit what was then new tech.

I think what Ninja Theory, the developer behind these games, needs to do is just come up with the stories. Get the idea, get the voice actors, get the beautiful graphics down (for an almost launch title the graphics are still pretty stunning), and then hire another team for the actual gameplay. Heavenly Sword would've been such an amazing game if it had the fluidity of God of War's controls. If there's one thing God of War did right, it was making the combat feel fun, visceral, and supremely satisfying whether you were mashing buttons or really taking the time to learn the technique. Heavenly Sword certainly was going in the right direction with what they were trying to accomplish, they just didn't allow for the finesse that the system they instituted required.

In the end, colorful characters and an interesting premise can't save a stale story and a broken combat system, especially in a hack and slash. With any luck, they'll hand the sequel over to the God of War folks and we'll get a truly awesome game. But until then...

Heavenly Sword gets a 6/10.