Here are our big robot heads live at E3 a few days ago - hands on with Heavenly Sword on the Playstation 3, one of the few gorgeous PS3 titles that is actually legit, playable, and definitely worth getting excited about. The game RAAAWWWWKS. Drive-by plot summary of the demo: you're this pissed off babe Nariko battling a bunch of guys in an arena with a ton of weapons, you can steer thrown objects (switches to first person camera) and it's not without it's gratuitiousness - check out her hair!!! So how was gameplay? Sw33t!!! Read on.
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Nariko's hair is the first thing we noticed about this game - it moves in slow motion like a fistfull of flowing SOTN Alucard capes in bullet-time gravity. You won't be able to hoard this game in your living room from the rest of your friends until 2007, but we were blown away by what we saw far. If I can only afford to eat one meal a week after I get my ps3 with a game, it's either this or Assasin's Creed. Since our home video camera can only show so much, also see this high-definition video where you can better see the framerate, detail, and an interview with Ninja Mikey, one of the key people behind the project. BTW they wanted to name their company something with the word Ninja and Ninja Theory is what they decided. I like it! Sounds more distinctive than that other "Team Ninja", even if it's not as catchy :)
It's button mashing on the next-gen console at it's best. We've played similar epic fighting games like this in the past like God of War, but this is bigger... and damn pretty at 1080. You have two basic attack buttons, circle is your throw button, and you have modifiers on your L and R to combo those attacks around. There's a block button, and if you hit Triangle (I think) immediately she'll do a wicked counter attack. But I was too distracted trying to make cool stuff on the screen happen to use any of that strategy!
You can knock over anything you walk into, you can pick random things up (including weapons that enemies drop), you can damage and destroy objects with realistic detail and physics, and her responsiveness to the movement felt very polished - not too fast, not too featherweight. As much as I love DMC that's always been my complaint - the guy feels like he's hollow. Despite a non-vibrating controller (I felt like I was holding a ps2 controller the whole time - very little difference). She moves a tad slower but is still agile - it works well. The demo was in a little closed colloseum, but the game is supposed to be larger and more expansive than that. Check out Ninja Theory's web site for more details on the game - especially the screenshots of the king's army marching in the field.
Having only seen very little of both games I was confused by this visual, as it looks a lot like some of the field battles in the upcoming Microsoft game 99 Knights. That game is also something to look out for - they claim to be able to display 1,000-2,000 soldiers onscreen at once. Hmm. Without a true physics engine on the Xbox 360 I'm sure that will probably look like shit, but we'll see. I just think back to Too Human and scratch my head... tisk tisk.
Here's two interesting factoids about this game directly from a developer interview on NextGen: the game uses enemy chat system where two bad guys are basically friends, and if you kill one of them the other one will react differently vs. when you kill someone not that close to him. Also, they are using something like 50% of the Cell processor's power for just the hair. That's interesting, because we saw games using 100% for everything else and they didn't look half as good as this! (cough cough Genji cough)
BTW the yelling and noise of the original video made it impossible to hear us dictating or to hear the sound effects of the game, so enjoy the music selection - classic 80's Thomas Dolby and 90's Beck music about a special kind of woman. She totally blinded us with science. (SCIENCE!)
Definitely a game to watch! Check out the NinjaTheory forums for more earlybird information on the game. Somebody already suggested that she and Kratos hook up, and the consensus is that she's too high maintenance for him.
Yanier "Niero" Gonzalez is Destructoid's founder and guy-in-the-helmet.After 2,000+ stories posted and years of starting trouble on the front page he's now busy behind the scenes building the future of Destructoid. His story is our motto: "Living The Dream".
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12:24 AM on 05.22.2006 | 
