Hello Darkness! The Official Blog of Helen Keller

HEAVENLY SWORD: THE REVIEW



This game has been a long time coming. Glimpses of it were given almost two years ago where it appeared to be a Goddess of War clone. If you haven't played God of War, it's a slash 'em up gore-fest where a large man with a huge dick whips bladed chain-sword things at people and fucks up a lot of people's shit. Also, the graphics are good. The demo to this game had kind of the same appeal, except without the dick and bladed chain things.

So, is this game any fucking good or did Sony take a massive dump on the PlayStation 3 yet again? Did Mackenzie King get messages from God on a two way teapot he kept in his garage? Has Paris Hilton had her uterus scraped more times than a fisherman's knuckle? The answer is actually a resounding hell yes.

GRAPHICS



Look at that shit folks. Just take a good goddamn moment to look at those graphics and then ask yourself if they're any good. Asshole, you don't need a moment, they're bonerific. Here, check out some fucking Super Nintendo shit:



Who the fuck knows what's going on in this picture? It looks like a gay My Name Is Earl shitfest in a fiery sewer. The PlayStation 3 is actually used here by Sony to blow minds. Up until now, I've been thinking they were full of shit about how good the damn PS3 was. Now I believe.

SOUND

Do people really give a shit about sound? Is somebody really going to turn a game down because they don't like the music? I suppose if every time a sword was slashed it made the sound of an elderly man doubled over with diarrhea cramps, that may have something to do with things, but the sound effects and the music are fine.

The voice acting is really, really damn good though. Normally, in these games, the voices are merely passable. The studio seems to grab some greasy fucking hobo off the street, promise him a 24 of Lakeport in exchange for reading some lines and then roll him down a hill and into a sewer basin when the lines are read. I actually wanted to watch the cutscenes where normally, I'm so goddamn bored by them I want to tear my nuts off and staple them to my forehead just to have an equal pain distract me.

GAMEPLAY

This is the category that should interest people the most. Graphics and sounds are kind of a given, but gameplay really does make or break a game. In this case, the game rather forces you not to be some dickhead button-masher. By constantly surrounding the heroine, Nariko, with enemies, simply wailing away on the controller will only lead to her getting cut worse than OJ in the prison lunch line. And the enemies are pretty swift too. If you've got a bad guy cornered and you're feeding him the beats, the enemies will surround your back. They'll wait for you to engage one enemy before swarming you. The combo system is okay, mostly I found it to be for show as opposed to anything truly useful. The normal stance [] ^ ^ ^ combo seemed to work the best as it had Nariko flipping up in the air at the end, getting in some extra strikes. The counter system is where's it at though. By waiting and timing your ^ press when an enemy attacks, you can either flip them, slam them or do some neato cut scene death. I'm a big fan of games with guards that reward timing, so this is awesome.

But wait, there's fucking more! Nariko's freaky flake sister Kai also joins the fight. She's an archer with like this arrow-bazooka cannon thing. By doing some initial aiming a la the over the shoulder Resident Evil 4 thing, each arrow can then be guided straight into the enemies face, crotch or choda by tilting the PS3 controller to fly the arrow. Normally I can't stand motion control, but in this case, it was pretty neat. If you practise, you can shoot arrows and curve them around a building, into the window and nail some asshole in his tit who's a couple of sequences ahead of where Kai is going. Picking off some guy a zillion miles away is pretty satisfying, especially if you give him a free Prince Albert piercing. The biggest beef though is that there's just a wee bit too much of Kai's scenes compared to the total game experience. A couple here or there to break up the sword play, fine. But crossing the gorge in the cart towards the armoury to get the stinking titular sword can take way too long and it blows rancid goat-chunks if you get killed near the end and have to do the whole fucking trip over from the start.

But wait, there's STILL fucking more! Tacked on like a new baby in a sixth season sitcom, there are also Hero Sequences. This shit started in Resident Evil 4 and is used by a lot of games now. Rather than watching neat action sequences, you're sucked into them by having to press buttons at random intervals to keep the scene moving. Sounds neat in theory, but it's acutally a devious piece of fuck.

By keeping me on my toes waiting for the next button press, I don't actually get to watch whatever the hero is doing. If I'm distracted by watching the inventive action scene, I'll miss the tiny window I have to press the appropriate button.

So what's the goddamn point of these scenes? I can't watch them. And if I do watch them, I get fucked over by them. They're a neat concept but in reality, really fucking stupid.

STORY

So what's the point of this game? Apparently, some king wants his hands on the Heavenly Sword and he's prepared to trump up a fight way worse than Bush ever did to get his hands on it. Nariko, the heroine, is destined to wield the sword to kick his ass and stop him. The game is actually a flashback, sort of. Nariko croaks in the first scene and is transported to the shittiest camp ground ever to justify her actions and try to change the outcome of dying.

Without ruining the ending, the story actually pales in comparison to the characters. Jumping Jesus Internet | Protected Mode On Christ, these characters rival movie characters. They actually manage to convey emotion. It's worth renting a PS3 and this game just to see what I mean. You probably won't, so just take my word for it then.

OVERALL

Overall, I enjoyed this game. Mostly, it means the PS3 isn't a massively overpriced paperweight capable of upconverting Battlestar Galactica DVDs to bogus 1080i.

So.....yeah.