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> Results: Heavenly Sword
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The ESRB says:
Blood GamerDad saw plenty of blood "puffs" as he was attacking Violence The majority of game time is spent killing the enemy soldiers with swords, arrows, and explosives Language Guards emit suitably guard-like terms as they're being attacked, like "s**t" Suggestive themes The chief villain makes a couple of lewd comments about female characters in the game, and one female boss slinks around suggestively With very little of interest thus far on the PS3, Heavenly Sword has been hyped up as one of the must-have exclusives. The martial arts-tinged gameplay has been compared to God of War. While it falls short of being a system-seller, and doesn't have the depth of God of War, I'm happy to say it mostly delivers on some of the hype. Without going into geeky detail, I will say the game looks and sounds fantastic, with some of the best human (and human-ish) depictions I've ever seen, but good looks don't necessarily mean a good game..  You take control of Nariko, the beautiful daughter of Shen, leader of a warrior clan sworn to protect the world from the evils of the Heavenly Sword, a weapon so powerful it grants the wielder god-like ability. The game actually begins near the end of the story, with Nariko desperately attempting to defend the clan from the massive army of the evil King Bohan, who wants the sword for himself. After a brief battle, the game begins proper, recalling the events of the five days prior. You'll spend most of your time fighting Bohan's bad guys using an interesting rock/paper/scissors combat system, where you need to flip between different stances to defeat each type of foe. This system works well for the most part, but not being able to manually block takes some getting used to. At times, you'll be playing the part of Kai, Nariko's weird little "sister", and instead of wielding a sword, you'll be playing "twing twang" - a disgustingly cute name for shooting enemies in the face with a crossbow. Kai's sections make heavy use of the motion-control aspects of the PS3 controller, as once you've fired a shot, you can control the path of the projectile in slow motion by tilting the controller. It makes for some initial frustration, but once I mastered the technique I looked forward to the levels where I played Kai. Similar motion control is used for a couple of other segments featuring Nariko. The problem with Heavenly Sword is that there's not much to it. The story is quite simplistic (though skillfully told), and the game itself is terribly short, made artificially longer by some frustrating boss battles that will have you repeating them multiple times, a significant contrast to the difficulty level of the rest of the game. The length wouldn't be so bad if you were thrown into lots of different situations, but you really only do a handful of activities throughout the game. Still, there's enough meat here to make for an enjoyable experience while it lasts, and I definitely hope for a more substantial sequel in the future. 
You spend a lot of time killing the humanoid guards with your swords and arrows, at times being directly asked to make a certain number of kills, in the hundreds, so this definitely a violent game. Some violent acts are shown in slow motion, stopping short of being gory but still quite graphic (such as manually guiding an arrow into a guard's head), and anything in the cut-scenes is depicted quite realistically. The background themes get a little dark, especially anything involving the insane pervert Bohan and his obvious obsession with Nariko; at one point he is raving about her being a demon and sinking her teeth into his genitals. Language-wise, there is some profanity ("s**t" and the like), but it's not excessive. One of Bohan's sidekicks is a serpentine female, and there is some suggestive dialog between them, as well as the fact that only a small leather bikini covers her scaly skin. The biggest surprise is that while Nariko is obviously created to be a good-looking woman to appeal to male players (a fact not lost on the marketing department or the cover artist), the game itself never really gratuitously portrays her as a "sexy warrior", despite her attire consisting of a couple of pieces of cloth and a fancy belt.
I do not consider this an adults-only title, but it's definitely not for younger children. I will say it stretches the ESRB's "Teen" rating more than most games I've seen, and suggest caution before allowing it to be played by younger teens if the content sounds like it may be a problem in your house. Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Heavenly Sword |
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