14 DAY TRIAL // 
It gives me the greatest of joys to be the one and only reviewer to benefit from this great title, well at least its demo version. I may not be the first, but it doesn't matter since the gaming experience that Heavenly Sword provides is a reward in itself. The game is probably the most anticipated PS3 title of the year, unless you count Final Fantasy XIII, but we're not even sure that it's coming out this year. The demo I played was only 5-10 minutes long, featuring full gameplay sequences and a couple of cutscenes. That wasn't my only contact with Heavenly Sword, as I've watched tons of videos showing the game's cool features and many interviews with the developers. Nothing compares to playing the real thing, with the groovy Sixaxis controller. The shock's still on, as I didn't recover from the wonderful experience that Heavenly Sword provided. It goes something like this...
Story From what I've seen in the trailer and uncovered after some serious research, Heavenly Sword features Nariko, as the main character, a superb red-haired warrior. I consider her to be the perfect Jessica Biel lookalike, but this is not the time for drooling, as we've got a neat plot to figure out. It turns out that she has to save her clan from the rampage that the evil King Bohan has started. To do so, our God-of-War-esque hero will have to wield the Heavenly Sword, an almighty weapon that has been kept safe by Nariko's ancestors. Only a heavenly warrior can use this holy item, with the sole purpose of destroying evil overlords.
Like in God of War, we'll see the main character die in the beginning of the game and she'll be sent back from the Purgatory to continue her destruction and revenge. The Heavenly Sword has the bad habit of draining the life out of its bearer, so Nariko has set on a suicide mission for sure. Unlike many other action games, this title has a pretty complex storyline, avoiding the standard Oriental cliches that one tends to associate with the looks of the armies we've seen battling in the trailers.
Concept & Gameplay Right from the get-go things are pretty simple, as you'll use the Sixaxis controller at its best, including its motion-sensing capacity in your combos as an extra something to trigger the eye candy sequences. Heavenly Sword is the big daddy of cineractives and you'll start one of those, in the first seconds of the demo, when Nariko has to speed down a couple of ropes that are being cut down by foes. She'll slide and jump from rope to rope in a way that the best cutscenes from Final Fantasy have shown us, but this time it's all gameplay baby! In case you didn't know, cineractives are semi-cutscene events, where your only task is pushing a certain button when you're told to thanks to an on-screen hint. By now, all God of War fans are surely used to this mechanism, so having a GOW background can come in handy if you want to master Heavenly Sword when it comes out.
The combat system relies on the use of stances and Nariko has three of them: the speed stance, the power stance and the range stance. In the speed stance, our favorite red-haired warrior will use her twin sword and block fast attacks. When the power stance is initiated, you'll combine the swords and use the resulting weapon to slice the enemies. This stance is slower but more powerful, allowing you to automatically block the enemy's most potent attacks. We've come to the range stance, probably the better looking of the three that will have Nariko using swords attached to chains (we're on the Kratos bus again) and covering lots of ground with her attacks. However, hitting multiple enemies at the same time sure has its disadvantages, as this stance doesn't allow you to block the incoming attacks. In case you were wondering, the player can change stances with the R1 and L1 buttons.
Another God of War similarity is the usage of the circle button for grabs that trigger cool-looking cutscenes. You'll usually see an enemy's spine getting broken or a neck snapping under the delicate touch of Nariko. The AI of the foes in the demo didn't impress me much, but I won't judge it till I get to play at least two hours of the game. All the enemies tend to attack like a group and there's no lonesome hero ready to face Nariko, so she'll have to fight them all and take on multiple opponents at the same time. In the merry month of September, when the game will be released, we'll get the chance to fight over 1000 individual on-screen characters, each with their own AI, or so say Ninja Theory. Heavenly Sword's combat system also features a counter attack, that's easily performed by pressing the triangle button at the precise moment when the enemy strikes you.
If your timing is 100 percent accurate, you'll be able to do a killer counter that looks good and deals lots of damage. Nariko will also use some sort of bazooka, quite an unusual gadget for the age portrayed in the game. The neat aspect of using this weapon is the fact that you'll be able to guide the projectiles with the aid of your Sixaxis controller and an on-cannonball camera. Jessica Biel's virtual twin sister has an actual sister in the game and she'll also be a playable character and sidekick. The little sis' uses a crossbow and the player will once again have the opportunity of watching the arrow fly thanks to a first person camera attached to it. How does it feel to enter the flesh of your enemies, with your point of vision being the tip of the arrow? Sometimes, the crossbow will prove to be an extremely useful weapon, especially when you light up your arrow and shoot it towards some explosive barrels.
However, this is all the stuff you'll see in the full game and all I could do was battle it out with two groups of foes. The use of the Sixaxis during combos is brilliantly implemented generating some good-looking moves that would make God of War cry. For example hitting an enemy and throwing him in the air gives you a fraction of a second to press the L1 or R1 button, then shake the controller a bit, lift the enemy in the air and start pounding him by pressing the action buttons. It takes a while to get used to the motion sensitivity of the PS3's controller, but the result is extremely rewarding: great combos and action sequences.
Obviously, although I didn't mention it, Nariko can do the usual rolls, dodges, kicks, but she's not too good with jumps. Consider this a minus, but there's no actual jump button in the game, so we'll only be airborne during combos. The red-haired warrior can also interact with her surroundings, grabbing a nearby chair and smashing it on an enemy's head. Foes can also be thrown in a desired direction, sometimes even thrown at their own mates. Those throws can be combined with the other combos to trigger spectacular series of moves that would even puzzle Jet Li.
Video All I can say about the game's graphics is that God of War 2 was a mere aperitif and Heavenly Sword is the full plate of the PS3's potential. Beautiful renderings and environments struck me from the first second, complemented by Nariko's fluid movement. The cineractives kept the GOW style and added some polished graphics plus a little bit of action. Also, you'll surely love the extra camera angle of the cannonball and arrow, after shooting them towards the enemy. You'll get to view destruction on a large scale first person and guide the projectile you just shot thanks to the Sixaxis.
500 people with dozens of sensors attached to their bodies contributed to the characters' fluid movements and realistic behavior. I've yet to see a combat sequence that features 1000 AI characters at the same time on the screen, all engaging in combat with Nariko. Breathtaking? It will surely be... Till September, I had to deal with the demo, realizing that the glare of the surroundings improved the looks of the areas that our heroine explored. The waterfalls, pastures or mountains look divine and there's no need to talk about cutscenes. Multiply the graphics of Final Fantasy: Advent Children by ten and you still won't be able to compare the result to Heavenly Sword's FMVs.
Sound Ninja Theory's game has one of the best soundtracks around and the official OST is surely on my Christmas wishlist. A full orchestra, performing at its best will reward the player with Oriental-style songs, adding a little bit of atmosphere to the already great cutscenes. The dramatic sequences will make you feel like you're playing a major blockbuster movie instead of watching it. Prince of Persia was the top of the pop, delivering some quality Oriental tunes to the players and remixing them with new songs. Heavenly Swords takes this further and offers an unique audio experience, including the chills you get in certain tense moments of the battle and the heroic score that gets you going, while being surrounded by 1000 foes.
Conclusion If playing the demo got me started this bad imagine how playing the game will be... From time to time (especially when a new console has just been launched), a perfect title comes out, usually followed by bad sequels. The fanbase of such a media product becomes huge and, like in the case of God of War, the title turns into a comparison term for all the other games of the genre, even for the ones that don't pertain to the genre. Will Heavenly Sword set the new standard for PS3 action games? We don't know the answer yet, but the title has surely set a new record for now: the longest repeated play of a 5 minutes-long demo...
