Heavenly Sword

What MotorStorm has become to racing and Odin Sphere to action role-playing, Heavenly Sword is now to 3D action: Perfection. [Sept 2007, p.17]

Heavenly Sword is a game that can genuinely claim to be a next-generation experience. Most excitingly for us this is not some clever new combat mechanic or simply more polygons; rather, it is a whole new level of story telling that doesn't simply insert pre-rendered films into the game, but integrates characters into the heart of each play component.

Heavenly Sword is finely crafted masterpiece that takes presentation in gaming to new heights.

Our initial criticisms on the sameness of combat that led to an overall feeling of tediousness have not been completely eradicated, however, as there is still very little variation in the enemies you face, but the improvements to the framerate certainly make the combos and counters a lot easier to perform.

Good-looking fighting with neat ideas and solid combat, but it's repetitive and short. [Oct 2007, p.80]

Too short despite early promise of an epic, Heavenly Sword is quite a disappointment. [Oct 2007, p.119]

Ultimately very few players will wish to repeat the experience and for such a high profile release questions have to be asked just what went wrong.

I rented this game back when it was released, did not get enough exposure and everything about it was burned into my memory forever. Finally bought it and I absolutely love this game. Nariko is one bad B****!

interesting story, visually stunning, music was great but the gameplay lacks.

A (mostly) enjoyable linear third-person hack & slash adventure in the God of War vein. Visually excellent; a unique style with a lot of effort put into character models, environments, motion capture performances and voice acting. Very much an early 7th gen console game, uses Sixaxis features (but this is horrible, and can be turned off) with lots of bonus materials to unlock. Gameplay is enjoyable enough; button mashy with an emphasis on combos. Some irritating design decisions do appear (for example dodge/roll is bound to the right analog stick, relies too much on QTEs), mostly good in terms of performance with some screen tearing when viewing larger vistas, load times can seem excessive but do not ruin the experience. Pretty good!

In an age we had great hack 'n' slash games like Devil May Cry and God of War, Heavenly Sword fails at every aspect, the combat is sloppy, the characters are goofy and badly designed, the bosses are ridiculous and we have awful stages where the game becomes a 3rd person shooter with enemy wave killing. Maybe the game did not aged well but for a hack 'n' slash fan, it just feels a mess.

Heavenly Sword is impossible to play normally on PS3 in 2023. I don't know what it looks like on the emulator on the PC, but on PS3 the game is just technically terrible. First of all, it is outdated in gameplay, and looks much worse in this regard even than the sequel to God of War. Sixaxis elements have been added to the gameplay (a terrible solution in Sony first wave exclusives on PS3). Graphically, the game does not look bad and clearly better than games of its time, but what's the point when your game does not even go to 30FPS, but in floating 20-25? How can you play a 25-frame slasher, and if there are more opponents on the screen, the FPS value can drop to 20-22 frames. It's just unplayable. Surprisingly, this is the debut project of Ninja Theory. Because not the setting, not the main character, not the plot (at least the first 4 hours) are not impressive. If you released a remaster on PS5, you can still give the game a second chance, and so this game is literally buried with PS3.