14 DAY TRIAL // At the time our console games reviewer got his hands on the PS3 exclusive action-adventure title from Ninja Theory, Heavenly Sword, we saw the PS3's true potential for the first time. Leaving aside gorgeous visuals and a score making your spine shiver, the game also sports an interesting control scheme using the SIXAXIS' motion sensitivity for a change, with no jump button though. Lately however, with the full game due out in just three weeks, fortunate blokes over at IGN were able to share a "full" impression. The game apparently has a lot of bad parts as well. Read on!
According to the well known gaming site, "...repetition is a frequent complaint, with some genuinely atrocious pacing decisions to blame. As much as we like Heavenly Sword's basic combat, enemy encounters - without exception - play out identically every single time; you enter a small, enclosed area which is locked down until you've cleared it of opponents, then progress to the next tiny section, ready to do it all again and again and again."
And this is not all. Earlier this month, Ninja Theory's Heavenly Sword got the worst from Itagaki, who called the game "half-assed," in an interview with Gaming Monthly. According to Itagaki, the on-screen button pressing sequences look a lot like those in Sony's God of War series, but don't provide a very engaging gameplay experience:
"I've never played a good game where the developers put a big icon of the button you're supposed to press onscreen," Itagaki told Electronic Gaming Monthly. "I look at Heavenly Sword and it seems really half-assed, because it's asking you to do all these button-timing sequences but you are not getting much pay-off from it."
Of course, you don't have to go by anyone's opinion here. When the same man was asked what he thought about Namco's Tekken series in the same interview, Itagaki boasted: "Tekken sucks. I don't know what you're talking about." Two of the most popular games today can simply "suck" and be "half-a*sed" just like that, but I do take IGN's word for it when they say the game is repetitive. Who cares that we'll get the chance to fight over 1000 individual on-screen characters, each with their own AI when the game is released, nothing impressive happens overall.