Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: September 12, 2007 (N.A.)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Ninja Theory
ESRB: Teen
Genre: Action/Adventure
Multiplayer: single-player only
Format: Blu-ray release ($69.99 CAD)
Notes: auto-installs 2GB to HDD on first run
Official website

Heavenly Sword is a title that I’ve had my eye on for quite a while. It’s been in some form of development for years, starting its life tentatively as a project for the original Xbox. Somewhere along the line, Sony took note of the game and made it a PS3 exclusive, a move that Microsoft must be kicking themselves for. Heavenly Sword aims to be one of the premier action-adventure titles ever created, and with a few notable wrinkles, it largely succeeds. This game is the definition of spectacular; in art direction, gameplay, music score, and execution. I only wish there were more of it.

The game centres around protagonist Nariko, and her role in the prophecy that her clan holds to. You can view a five-part animated series on the web (or downloadable on PSN) which gives the backstory, so I won’t belabour it here. Suffice it to say, she is the “curse” of her fellow tribesmen, in that the prophecy they hold to was shattered when she was born a woman, rather than the man that was destined to wield the divine weapon under the clan’s protection. This pathos is the driving force behind her character. The sword was never meant to be used, and particularly not by her. When she takes up the blade in a moment of desperation, she seals her own fate – those who use it will die. And die she does, in the first moments of the game. The rest of the story is told as a series of playable flashbacks, covering the five days leading up to that moment.

Heavenly Sword has been often, and rightly, compared to God of War. It shares a number of similar characteristics: it is a single-player adventure game focusing heavily on one-vs-many combat, in the manner of a martial arts drama. Like God of War, there are no exploratory elements to speak of – it is always clear where you are supposed to go and what you are supposed to do, and the game camera is scripted. Unlike God of War, Ninja Theory manages to add a lot of variety to the levels with a secondary character (Kai), who has her own game mechanic, that of a ranged sniper with a crossbow. Both elements work surprisingly well.

Nariko’s sword has clearly been designed by a D&D nerd with way too much time on his hands. It actually has three modes (“stances”) that can be used, which form the core of the combat system. The sword splits into two blades that can be used in each hand, which is the default stance; holding R1 while fighting modifies the stance into a single powerful Cloud-like blade that is slower, and holding L1 modifies the stance into a set of Kratos-like whirling chain blades. Square and triangle buttons provide the usual regular and heavy attacks within each stance. Using the stances effectively is the key to optimizing the your level of asskickery. The game makes some unusual decisions in implementation: for instance, there is no jump button (which horrified legions of early fans – seriously, google it, there’s a petition), and blocking is automatic – provided you are in the correct stance. This change takes some getting used to, particularly when one is accustomed to the God of War/Ninja Gaiden/Devil May Cry block button and leaping about. Thankfully, it works extremely well; its not just change for change’s sake. The game’s combat-heavy focus means that this gameplay in particular had to really shine, and it does.

Incoming enemy attacks are colour-coded (again much like God of War or Prince of Persia), and taking note of these colours adds complexity to the fighting. A blue glow from an enemy will mean a speed attack; an orange, power; and red is an unblockable attack that must be avoided. Heavenly Sword also applies a counter method, in which you can hit triangle at precise moments to turn an enemy attack into a counterattack of your own. Also in this mix are aerial combos, achieved by knocking a stunned enemy into the air with a powerful ranged swipe and then flicking the sixaxis up to launch yourself into the air, thus landing an additional series of stylish anime-inspired moves. Style is the word here: everything about Nariko’s animation screams attention to detail. The number of combination moves is phenomenal, and compounded by the stance-switching on the fly. It doesn’t take long before you are completely flipping out Crouching Tiger-style, deflecting arrows with a whirlwind of chain-blades, bisecting your foes in twain, and generally littering the landscape with the blood and limbs of those unfortunate enough to stand in, or near, or even vaguely in the vicinity of, your path. Where God of War‘s emphasis was on visceral brutality, Heavenly Sword aims for deadly grace.

Also in Nariko’s repertoire is the ability to pick up just about any object in the environment – shields, dropped swords, and even fallen soldiers – and throw them. This makes us of an ‘aftertouch’ system (with either the sixaxis motion tilt or the analog stick) where holding down the throw button causes the camera to follow the projectile, allowing the player to sort of steer the thing through the air. A quick tap will hurl the object quickly, but the fun is really in the aftertouch, as you can do crazy stuff like send a shield bouncing off of multiple soldiers Captain America-style, or throw a sword into an opponent’s left eye from across the room. Some puzzles throughout the game make use of this method; they’re simple and don’t require much thought (ok, any thought), but it’s another addition that helps change things up from the combat-heavy sections. It can be tricky to aim items initially, as since the camera is fixed/scripted, you can’t actually see in a specific direction to throw the thing until it’s already in the air. The aftertouch is quite generous, allowing you to practically guide things around corners, which somewhat makes up for this. It would have been nice to have a first-person view, if only briefly, to help out a bit with the aiming. This game mechanic is also used to great extent in the cannon and Kai sequences, which I will detail later.

Presentation-wise, Heavenly Sword is the among the best I’ve ever seen. The art direction is a mixture of Asian influences from Tibet and Mongolia, combined with some European/Tokien-esque influences in the larger battle sequences. Graphically, the game looks almost painfully vivid. Everything in the level design is about majestic vistas, distant waterfalls, incredible use of volumetric light, motes of dust in the air – not to mention, scenes containing literally hundreds of enemy soldiers, each distinct and sharp. It screams “epic”. The character models are extremely detailed and memorable, and have the benefit of a first-class performance-capture treatment courtesy WETA Digital and Andy Serkis, who also plays the game’s main villain. These scenes simply have to be seen to be fully appreciated. It’s actually shocking to see game characters with this level of sophistication in the dramatics: Heavenly Sword sets the bar for acting in a videogame. And you can tell that the actors had a lot of fun with these roles, too. The histrionics are completely over-the-top and bombastic. General Flying Fox stands out as a withered, androgynous sadist with retractable blades eminating from his back, and who walks and talks like a twisted bird-man. Kai, the other playable character, has been described quite accurately as a cross between Gollum and Björk. King Bohan himself is hilariously super-evil; Serkis managed to somehow inject a unique, memorable quality to his character even though he essentially plays your standard-issue Evil King, albeit one obsessed with his own crotch. Nariko herself is frankly terrifying, having grown up shunned by everyone she knows, barely tolerated by her own father for simply existing, and apparently doing nothing but combat training to fill the time that would have under normal circumstances been spent on a lucrative modelling career. She wears vengeance like you or I would wear a pair of fuzzy slippers; she is extremely comfortable with the notion. The music also stands out as a singular achievement; the themes are memorable and distinct, possessing an unusual ethnic quality to them that separates Heavenly Sword‘s score from the usual Wagnerian battle opus. Artistically, across the board, you can tell that a lot of love went into this game.

Kai is the second playable character. A very disturbing kid, taking great pleasure in speaking to imaginary friends, cartwheeling around and generally acting like she’s way off her meds in between murderous sprees. Her oeuvre is entirely focused on ranged attacks instead of close combat – in fact her only melee option is a quick stun. She uses the most impressive crossbow-gun I’ve ever seen. It’s bigger than she is, is semi-automatic, and even has a kind of primitive laser-sighting system using lenses and mirrors attached to the barrel. Her sections help break up Nariko’s slugfest levels and form an intertwining narrative within the arc of the game. Normally, when developers take this route, the secondary gameplay always seems to suffer, not getting the atttention that the primary game receives. Thankfully this is not the case here: Kai’s crossbow also uses aftertouch, which makes her a fucking evil shot. You can steer each and every bolt. It takes some getting used to at first, but before long you are putting multiple shots into enemies just to revel in the gut-wrenching accuracy. Firing Kai’s crossbowgunthing also slows down time, and you can watch distant enemies trying to dive in slo-mo out of the way – which of course cannot possibly save them from remote-controlled cruise bolts. One sequence in particular stands out: Kai must provide covering fire for an unarmed, wounded companion as he stumbles across a bridge, with enemy guards charging from both ends (during which the game makes great use of a 24-style picture-in-picture presentation). There’s a handful of enemy archers and about two dozen soldiers, and each of them could easily get 2-3 bolts each within the span of about two minutes. It seems like steering the shots would get old fast, but it really doesn’t; like the thrown weapons, Kai has the option of merely shooting without the aftertouch, but it’s just so damn fun you do it anyways. Aiming a bolt through the flames of a torch and then into a fireworks cache near some guards is extremely satisfying. There are other sequences to the game that use the aftertouch: wall-mounted and handheld cannons that Nariko can use in certain levels. These are just as fun, providing you with steerable cannonballs and flaming rockets that cause the appropriate levels of carnage.

The game also makes use of the sometimes-questionable “quicktime events”, or “hero sequences” as they are termed here, in which portions of gameplay are performed by playing a kind of frenetic Simon Says through matching on-screen button cues (again much like God of War). These are thankfully not over-used; in boss fights and in between some of the action sets, they are used to show off some great animation and drive the plot forward. A nice touch is that the developers have actually created some varied shots for these parts, as well as a certain tolerance. Missing one or two buttons will not automatically cause the sequence to “fail”, but in fact add a bit of dramatic tension: for instance, instead of landing cleanly on a ledge after a big leap, Nariko might miss and barely catch it with her hand.

Heavenly Sword is not without its warts. The biggest issue I had with the game was not a gameplay problem but rather a design decision in the presentation of certain cut-scenes. In order to “mask” the load times of some levels, some of these cinematics are rendered as video rather than using the in-game engine. The idea is to play a cutscene while the level loads, rather than have the user stare at a progress bar. Great idea – unfortunately, as the level data is fetched, the simultaneous loading and video playback cannot seem to keep up, causing some very noticeable hitches in the frame rate. These are mercifully brief, but mar some otherwise superb narrative scenes. It’s obvious that the developer’s rather ambitious goal was to never see a load screen – but frankly, I would have been more than happy to stare at the progress bar for a few seconds, rather than screw up the presentation of such great acting. Other times the lip synch can seem to be just a few milliseconds off, which is also annoying (it doesn’t take much slippage before this becomes really noticeable). Why go to all the trouble of producing these lavish sequences if you’re just going to deliver it poorly, for the sake of not showing the standard load screen? I actually hope that Ninja Theory opts to patch the game and help fix this up a bit, as it just seems like an unnecessary blemish.

(Nariko is that thin strip of white pixels, lower center. See what I mean?)

Other moments of the game, particularly when there are several hundred enemies on-screen, can see the frame rate dip into the range of 15-20 FPS or so, as well as some mild screen-tearing on some of the faster sequences. These issues are relatively minor and do not detract from the gameplay experience; indeed, they are all the more noticeable just because the rest of the game is so stunning. Also, sometimes the physics calculations of objects can act a little wacky. When Nariko throws something, she throws it really hard: a hurled shield sometimes can go careening around a room like a ricocheting bullet. I’m willing to give Ninja Theory a pass on not having completely perfect delivery in light of the fact that these levels often contain quantities and qualities that I’ve never seen in a game before.

Another complaint, which is really a compliment, is the length of the game: it takes about 6 hours to complete on normal difficulty. I wish it were longer, because what is there is just so good. Having said that, I can think of other games with about the same length that I enjoyed immensely (God of War II and Ico come to mind). I do plan on going through it again in the unlocked “Hell mode” that appears after the first completion.

In the end I would characterize Heavenly Sword as a very competent, and sometimes very surprising, first chapter in what I hope will certainly be a large action-adventure series. It is not without its warts, but the gameplay is solid, and this is what counts in the end. When you become accustomed to the fighting system, it is amongst the most fantastically realized action-combat games ever devised. That’s a controversial statement, but I stand by it.