Heavenly Sword

Heavenly Sword is one of those games that is just really strongly associated with the PlayStation 3. The lead character Nariko also appears in the PlayStation All-Stars game. It was released in 2007 and developed by Ninja Theory who are still active today and are producing well known and well received titles. It has never been re-released, remastered or ported to any other platform than the PlayStation 3.

King Bohan, the primary villain, his army and team of henchmen is laying siege to Nariko’s village in order to try and acquire the mysterious weapon, the Heavenly Sword. Nariko is tasked with protecting the sword which can give you great power but at the cost of taking your life.

Heavenly Sword has the feel of the type of game you’d expect to find towards the end of the PlayStation 2’s life but everything has been ramped up to take advantage of the new hardware the PlayStation 3 had to offer. A lot of effort was put into making the game as cinematic as possible. Well known actors such as Andy Serkis played the primary villain King Bohan and Anna Torv starred as the lead role Nariko. It’s clear to me that they really wanted to take advantage of the latest hardware and try to merge the worlds of cinematic visual effects and console gaming. The Lord of the Rings movies had released between 2000-2003 and their visual effects department, Weta Workshop, shot to fame for many reasons, one of those being the amazing CGI work on the extremely life-like creature Gollum, who not coincidentally was played by Andy Serkis. Weta Workshop really honed the technology of motion capture and subsequently Ninja Theory worked with them to use the same technique here.

The game is primarily a hack and slash adventure game. It feels very like God of War at times, not a bad game to take inspiration from, you mostly do some very light exploring and interacting with environments before stumbling across the next wave of enemies where you must lean into your combat skills to take them on. You have 3 different fighting styles to use: speed, strength and range, each with their own combo list. You progress through these sorts of micro stages where you are rated up to 3 stars based on your performance. This is quite clever as these stars or points are used to unlock things like artwork or behind the scenes footage.

The fighting mechanics are pretty solid, very occasionally let down by the game’s general performance issues. Some frame rate drops and screen tearing can be painful, but where the game really did something was unique was with the new Six-Axis controller. Perhaps desperate to try something new or enforced by Sony executives to try and make use of the new technology, the fighting segments are broken up with these ‘projectile’ sections. Typically Nariko or Nariko’s friend Kai, who you can also play as sometimes, will wield a cannon, rocket launcher or crossbow and you need to take down siege towers or waves of enemies at a distance. You can fire your projectiles with a simple press of a button but what the game really wants you to do is to press that button and then hold it. Holding the fire button down pushes you into the perspective of the projectile and it becomes a super slow-motion scene where you then need to move that projectile to its target using nothing but the six-axis motion controls. You have to park the part of your brain that wants to point out that this makes no sense because the projectile can’t take on a mind of its own once launched. Moving the projectiles with the six-axis motion controls is very difficult, you can get quite good with it but there is a steep learning curve and it is very frustrating. I appreciate what they were trying to do with it, but it just doesn’t feel like the right type of game to use it.

The game tells the story very much from Nariko’s perspective right down to her inner thoughts. There are many segments where she is looking into the camera and you are hearing that inner dialogue. It’s really interesting to compare to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a PlayStation 4 game that Ninja Theory also made years later, which did a lot of this style of story telling, but explored it much more deeply. Interestingly enough that game is also very short but it was hugely acclaimed, funny how things change.

Visually I really enjoy the game, they manage to create a beautiful, rich world, with plenty of design elements and lore that make you want to know more. It also manages to use the PlayStation 3 hardware to create these incredible set pieces where thousands of enemies are on screen at once. The behind the scenes footage claims they could do 2000 enemies on screen at once. These sequences very much feel like you are on a battlefield in a war, something that a lot of games really struggle with. Other aspects of the hardware were also put to interesting use, according to Official PlayStation Magazine, one of the six special processors available on the CPU was used soley for the physics of Nariko’s hair which flaps around wildly at times. The hair is definitely doing a lot of things but whether or not that is a good thing, I will leave up to you.

At the time the game got positive reviews but did receive a lot of criticism for its short play time. This is not something that bothers me anymore, I understand if you paid full price back in 2007 and then were done with the game in a weekend it hits hard, but actually shorter games are quite preferable to me now, especially in the retro scene. The six-axis motion control segments are probably the most divisive segments. They are kind of annoying. Moving the whole controller and your body to try and get the projective to turn left feels a little bit silly. I like the world, the lore, the combos. There was apparently a whole trilogy planned for Heavenly Sword but sadly, with the games large budget failing to be recouped, this never materialized, but I would have liked to see more. You can pick this game up pretty cheaply, less than £10 and I think given it only exists on the PlayStation 3 for a PlayStation 3 enthusiast this game is a must own.