You can toss people in this game in slow motion, and then the enemies ragdoll, so that's kinda funny and neat I think.

You fight too!

5/10 One of the prettiest tech demos for the PS3.

Esse jogo chega a ser engraçado de tão RUIM.

A história é horrível e nada cativante, os vilões são uma completa desgraça de ruins, os diálogos e cutscenes são completamente vergonhosos.

A gameplay é minimamente decente tirando o parry horrível, a maneira horrenda de defender ataques e os ataques à distância com o six axis.

As bossfights desse jogo são tediosas, elas são sempre uma rotação entre defender ataques a distância e dar chip damage com ataques corpo a corpo, isso limita os combos desse jogo que são bons porque o boss sempre defende depois de 2 ataques.

Os únicos motivos pra se jogar esse jogo é pelo VA do Andy Serkis que faz um vilão bem nós. E os diálogos engraçadíssimos entre a protagonista e os vilões, não duvido nada que o roteiro desse jogo foi escrito por uma garotinha de 11 anos fanfiqueira, porque sinceramente é bem isso que parece.

Enfim 4/10.

Pretty decent hack and slash that lacks a lot of polish in every aspect outside of the acting. The concept behind the combat is actually really amazing and fun at times but it gets progressively ruined by enemies that just block every attack you throw out. The story is decent but really goofy at the same time. My major complaint is that they try to tell us that the blade used is cursed but nothing bad really happens with sword until like the end of the game and it feels like there was legitimately no negative effects of using the sword.

TLDR its a game that can be fun with its gameplay but its lack of polish makes you feel like it needed a sequel to be amazing

When a brand new game console launches we all look toward the games they launch with to really show us what the console is capable of. There have been some failed system launches with either very few games or just poor ones. The PS3 was not such a console especially with Heavenly Sword backing it and wowing gamers across the world. Heavenly Sword puts the characters Nariko and Kai in your hands as you battle an evil warlord trying to take over your clans’ land.

Right from the start of the game you get introduced to sweeping epic landscapes, amazing graphics, beautiful sounds, and a great, albeit simple, combat system. For being a launch title the game has excellent production values and they really shine for the PS3.


The most important part of Heavenly Sword is the combat system and it never falters. You don’t receive the Heavenly Sword until a bit into the game, but once you do you are welcomed to three different fighting styles on the fly. Instead of having to stop the game and switch styles you can use them by just holding down a button. You are always in “speed” mode which breaks the sword into two swords while L1 puts you in “range” mode that is kind of like Kratos’ chain swords in God of War (which Heavenly Sword receives its nickname “Goddess of War”), and lastly holding down R1 puts you in “power” mode. There are a good amount of combos that let you switch in and out of these styles with amazing animations and a cinematic sweeping camera. Another element to the gameplay is the counter system. The enemy will glow the color of the style you need to be in to counter. Standing still is automatic block so hitting an attack button at the right time will perform a killer counter attack.

On top of this, you play as Kai who has a deadly semi-automatic crossbow that can be controlled with “aftertouch” which is controlled with the SixAxis motion controls. This was one of the first game to really utilize the SixAxis with bone-crunching and nasty kills from guided bows or anything else you can hurl at the enemy.


Puzzles in the game aren’t really a challenge since there aren’t many of them, but the bosses are. Each boss has multiple health bars, and once you get one knocked down you initiate a button pressing sequence by hitting circle (sounds just like God of War). Some bosses are just downright hard and seem impossible to beat, but remembering their attacks is the key.

Not only does the game look and sound amazing, but the story is riveting and so is the acting. With full motion capture sequences, this game has some of the most realistic facial animations I have ever seen. With Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings, Ink Heart) as a director and actor on board, you are treated with amazing work.
If the combat isn’t satisfying enough for you there are epic battles where you fight thousands of soldiers on-screen at once. Shooting a cannon and using after touch is just so satisfying especially towards the end of the game. If you are also curious about collecting items you can unlock stuff by doing certain tasks or meeting certain goals in each section of the game. With such a beautiful game you would want to see how it was made.


If I had to see a flaw in Heavenly Sword it would be that the game is extremely short clocking in at 4-6 hours depending on your playstyle. You could literally beat this in one or two long play sessions. The game also has some technical issues with some slow down and occasional choppy animation. The combat is also a bit shallow and a tad too button mashy. Other than that I can’t wait for the sequel to be announced, but it has been over 3 years and no word, so I feel this great new IP has been abandoned.

text by tim rogers

★⋆☆☆

“DEFINITELY NOT THE GAME ANYONE INVOLVED WANTED TO MAKE.”

In a riveting scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia”, William H. Macy’s character, teeth broken out of his skull, tells someone he just met, “I have so much love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Ignoring the fact that it makes you objectively gay to actually express sympathy for the man portrayed in said piece of cinema, we can move right along and say that each and every human being at Ninja Theory, developers of this videogame called Heavenly Sword, would probably say the same thing if they’d fallen off a metal ladder and had their teeth broken in. Heavenly Sword is a big, lush game, crafted with careful and deliberate attention to what’s popular in videogames these days, and it’s also just about jaw-droppingly boring.

I have wracked my brain, and the brains of many innocent and unwilling civilians, and pored over the cat-burglar-calling-card-like clues that plopped all around the PlayStation Store in the months leading up to the game’s release, and I have come to the Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that Heavenly Sword is in no way the videogame that anyone working on it actually wanted to make. You can tell by the way the nice-enough developers chat about the game in the making-of featurettes, you find scraps of evidence in the shiny two-minute “anime” episodes.

Exhibit A: the PlayStation Store description for the making-of featurettes touts the game as “with a budget rivaling a Hollywood blockbuster”. So games are at war with Hollywood now? And whoever spends the most money is the winner? That settles that debate.

Exhibit B: the anime episodes are actually called “anime” — they’re obviously trying to sell the game to the anime-liking crowd, via wholly optional episodes of “anime” that look good and go nowhere plot-wise, just like, hey, most actual anime.

Exhibit C: I see these anime episodes and think, “If the game actually looked like this, I’d probably buy it”, which is exactly what they want people to think. As far as the marketers are concerned, the next step from here is “Well, the game doesn’t actually look like this, though I guess I’ll buy it anyway.”

Exhibit D: a video I saw on YouTube around two months ago, comparing the way this game ended up looking on PlayStation 3 to the way it used to look when it was in development on Xbox. Back on Xbox, the main character was a large-headed China-dress-wearing kung-fuing she-freak. This must have been because the developers knew that another popular game on the Xbox was Dead or Alive, where characters looked just about exactly the same. Now that the game’s on PS3, the main character is something like the daughter of a supermodel and the hero from God of War. She has some kind of ambiguous friend, who’s about halfway mentally &^#$#ed, who wears a cat ear hood, because, as we’ve established, someone on the game’s staff both watches and likes anime. It’s safe to say that the oriental trappings were chosen because someone had a hunch that east Asia was marketable and no one could prove him wrong. And while the game isn’t nearly as offensive with its setting as Jade Empire, which painstakingly recreated a “mythical fantasy world” that looked a whole heck of a lot like Ancient China and then hired an actual linguist to create some hokey-as-stuff-sounding “Ching-chong ching-chong” Chinese apery and/or scrawl disgusting scribbles on scrolls in temples instead of just, you know, using actual Chinese and being done with it, it has these jarring, groan-worthy moments in which large Asian-looking men will scream at our red-haired femme fatale, “I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!” I’m pretty sure that coloquialism didn’t exist in any one of the many imaginary Japanese historical periods. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually any Japanese girls named “Nariko”.





How is the game, then, you ask? Who gives a heck? Read IGN, for God’s sake.

Heavenly Sword screams focus-tested, market-safe, screenshot-approved. The graphics are nice enough, with more bloom than a rose garden. The music is brassy, boring Bruckheimer-film-score stuff. There are big, meaningless heaps of collapsing architecture and things that break just because something needs to break. There are enemies who block every attack you throw at them, because otherwise, you’d never press any different buttons. If you want to just keep pressing the same button, however, you can do that, and you might get away with it. It’s actually not that terrible to play, when you’re fighting things. You dial in combos and hit the right button when you see a flash on the screen, to perform a “spectacular” “finishing move”. After seeing these a hundred times or so, you won’t care less, though as a core game system, I guess it’s not too terrible. There are boss battles, and a story that I suppose is more interesting than taking a stuff without a magazine to read, and while it’s easier to follow than the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” film’s screenplay-by-the-numbers, it sure as hell isn’t Tolstoy. It’s just . . . there.

Should it be trying to be Tolstoy? There’s the rub. Games that, in the past, have tried to be Tolstoy have included Sin and Punishment, the pre-written English script of which scared so much stuff out of so many marketing directors that the game, spectacular as it was, never got released outside of Japan. Heavenly Sword is made by British people; Britian is a country that has produced many proud people who hecked the system and did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of rock and roll, though Ninja Theory is acting bizarrely Japanese, like one of those aching Japanese developers who avoids showing off by clinging to one tired license for twenty years. Except they don’t have a license. They just have Heavenly Sword. And after playing Heavenly Sword, I’m neither convinced nor not convinced that they could make a great game, that they could put all their love somewhere without frightening us or putting us to sleep. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it might be nice if they try, though I will be (slightly) unfair and insist that, with Heavenly Sword, they didn’t try, really. There’s the occasional scene where you control a semi-&^#$#ed girl whose method of “attacking” involves pressing the appropriate button to counter an enemy’s attack and swerve around them; I could try really hard to spin this out and call it a subversion the modern trend in “stealth” segments in videogames, though when I consider how heavily the game relies on quick-timer events (press X rapidly to run down a chain!), and how utterly bland the rest of the game is, I have to go ahead and consider the actual cool concept an accidental one-off.

Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, when asked what he thought about this game for some reason, said that the quick-timer events were boring, and that he would never make a game with such things in it. Itagaki is known for saying some jerkweed things with diarrhea frequency, though sometimes you really have to hand it to the guy. A spokesman for Ninja Theory, clearly on the defensive because he has Dead or Alive posters on his wall, was quick to say that they put these button-rapping events into the game because it allows players to experience an unparalleled level of cinematic excitement that they can’t experience merely through playing the game. I thought about this answer, knew deep in my heart that it was a cop-out, scoffed, and spoke to my computer monitor: “Maybe you just need to make some more interesting games!” There was no one around to high-five me, so I got a little depressed for a bit, and I got even more depressed when I realized that the Ninja Theory dude’s statement had been, essentially, a confession — he was apologizing for not being able to think of more interesting concepts for a game. All at once, it dawned: this is why Treasure bases their games on one tiny core concept, explored and mutated throughout the duration of the game; this is why Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden lets the player run up walls: without these little crunch-pockets, your videogame is not a videogame. Man, I don’t even like Ninja Gaiden, and here I am defending it. I guess that says about all there is to say about Heavenly Sword, then.

Cons:
1. Something about this game is not right, but i can't tell what.
2. The sound track do not match the spirit of the game.

Pro:
1- Great fighting physics and animations.
2- Good story.
3- Great characters on both side.
4- From graphical standpoint, it matches the era that game released.
5- Not that long to make game boring.

Remember this is a 2007 game, and it is a very good game for that era, other than 2 cons that i said.

Technical note on emulation:

You can emulate this game on pc, but you can't play with Xbox controller. The game is only playable with Genuine Dual Shock 3/4 Control (not even bootleg ones). Also i should mention that it is one the most cpu intensive games that i ever emulated, to the point that i found this is a hard pressure on my cpu (Ryzen 5 5500), and started playing via PS3 (borrowed from a friend). Maybe Ryzen 5 5600 or i5 12400 is good enough to emulate the game with ease.

I played this for the first time this year, and it's a hard game to judge without playing it back then. I can tell that the animations and visuals must have been great, it's still impressive to watch some of the cutscenes, and there are some massive scenes with hundreds of NPCs on screen, something we rarely see even today.

But these things won't carry the game in 2023. The controls are not as responsive as I would like, and the PS3 controller is not as good as modern controllers, the game can feel like walking underwater.

The game wants you to counter a lot with its 3-style combat system. But the slightly sluggish controls made me abandon that and I ended up button-mashing my way through the game.

I found the campaign to be too obsessed with large encounters, I wish I could run around and bump into one or two enemies, practicing my countering and combat styles, but it's structured in a way where you walk into an area and get swarmed most of the time.

There is also a good deal of motion sensor gimmick fights, where you tilt your controller trying to guide projectiles around. I'm not sure how people like these parts, but I actually liked these sections a lot.

And lastly, the characters in this game are so odd, Nariko the main protagonist is fine, even if she looks like a supermodel from another world compared to the other characters, but the enemies are so weird it's hard to describe it. They remind me of a Monthy Python sketch or a rude and crude version of Benny Hill. You really have to see it to believe it.

It's a rough but fascinating early PS3 game.

I saw all the bad reviews of this game, and for the first Chapter or so, I thought I was weird for enjoying myself. The visuals were nice, the combat was fun, and the world/story seemed interesting!

Then I kept playing.

This game is so incredibly sub par in every way. The combat is satisfying at first, but the enemy variety, and repetitive level design makes it boring and annoying after the initial few chapters.

The voice acting and writing is awful, and cringe inducing, with the notable exception being Andy Serkis, who does a great job playing the villain.

The cutscenes themselves were fine, though the game too often would throw poorly telegraphed quick-time events, which would make trying to relax and enjoy the cutscenes impossible. The margin for error was slim too, which was especially frustrating for every single boss fight that had to end in that way.

Don’t even get me started on the “puzzles”. Throwing objects with poorly thought out and annoying to control motion sensors were some of the most frustrating parts of the whole experience. Even when I turned the motion controls off to control projectiles with the analogue sticks, it just slowed down gameplay for an already tedious game.

The last chapter however, was very fun. The final battles felt huge, and even with a choppy frame rate and some minor design annoyances, the entire chapter was a solid end to the prior levels. The final boss fight I found very satisfying to learn the patterns and timings of - though the aforementioned quick time events certainly ruined a lot of the fun I was having, even here.

I fear a lot of these issues are just due to this game ageing poorly - but all in all, I won’t be touching this one again.

Heavenly Sword sadly never got the recognition it deserved for being a launch title , and oddly enough, I feel that is due to it being a launch title. Heavenly Sword is plagued with a lot of issues that came with early PS3 games, mainly forced motion controls and lack of PS3 trophies. While the lack of trophies are more apparent as it weakens the value for Trophy hunters, the real downfall was the motion controls. Being forced into a number of sections through out the game in order to use the clumsy six axis control is a chore and nearly half the time you use them it slows down the pacing immensely.
Aside from these hiccups tho, Heavenly Sword does manage to be a neat little hack'n'slash game with some really interesting boss battles and over the top characters, amazing face capture technology at the time, and a genuinely interesting story. While the framing of the story isn't exactly the best set up, with most of the game being a flashback, the highlights are the interactions of the ever serious Nariko and her cast of zany counterparts.
While I don't think Heavenly Sword will turn everyone's heads around to play it, if you ever wanted to play another game like God of War on the playstation, you can't really go wrong with Heavenly Sword. Despite all it's warts it's still a pretty fun time, but you do have to go through some grim to get there.

Another game which has been often spoken about and recommended leading me to believe it was well worth playing. Unfortunately in 2024, 17 years after the game’s initial release, it has not aged well.

Heavenly sword is an action-adventure developed by Ninja-Theory set in a fantasy world. The story revolves around Nariko who has been entrusted with protecting her clan with the powerful Heavenly Sword. The game starts off with a fierce battle and Nariko’s death, the rest of the game is told in flashbacks and the events which led to that battle.

At the time, having motion capture as well as having the king of motion capture onboard, Andy Serkis was a massive selling point of the game. However compared to today's standards of motion capture the results in Heavenly Sword look so unnatural to laughably bad at times. More notably than the motion capture is how wild the animation of Nariko's hair is. It just flails around in the air like when you see alpha footage of an animated film.

The game has not aged well. The framerate absolutely drags at times with lots of screen tearing making some combat very frustrating. Also as the game was from a generation where the game data is read directly off the disc, the load times are very long. Other poorly aged aspects of the game are its gameplay mechanics such as Quick Time Events which happen completely out of the blue during the slow frame rate and screen tearing meaning you will most likely miss the prompts first time around. THe graphics though, for the time are fine, as an early PS3 game they aren’t terrible.

The controls could be better, this was still before the time of a solid standardised control set among games. Not being able to freely jump in a hack and slash game is such a mood killer. Using the right-stick to dodge is too far for the player's thumb to travel in a short space of time. There didn't seem to be any way to change this. The game, being released early in the PS3's lifecycle makes use of the sixaxis controller feature much to the dismay of many. Luckily this can be turned off.

The main combat with the titular Heavenly Sword is very unsatisfying and unrewarding. You are given with new combos and artwork unlocks but for me, someone who struggles to remember combos and didn't have enough interest in the game to care about the art this all amounted to nothing. Each chapter you are essentially moving area to area while the game throws a large quantity of the same enemy at you. It reminded me of those mobile games you see adverts for which is one player mowing down an army of soldiers.

I liked the combat where you used a gun of some sort to fire projectiles. I found this much more fun than fighting with Nariko and her sword, defeating the main purpose of the game. The arrow firing missions can be frustrating though as each slow motion arrow takes ages to reach its target.

All boss battles up to the last one, Bohan, were beaten due to a complete fluke as far as I’m concerned. Nariko would carry out random moves that I had no idea how I was managing to execute. The last fight against the flying fox heavily relies on you countering which I only learned but never mastered in the last boss battle. I threw the towel in during the second stage of the Bohan fight due to how frustratingly hard it was. I could never get the timing of the counter attacks right. I was relieved to hear I was not alone in this, other players have struggled too.

There were at least two occasions (usually at boss fights) where I almost threw in the towel, at roughly 7 hours long I pushed myself to at least try and finish it. The only thing I’m glad of is that I can say I experienced the game and made my best effort but it’s not one I would recommend to newcomers in this day and age. If you played the game on release and you love it then good for you, I wish I liked the game that much.

Combat system was enjoyable with the use of the 3 stances. I found that although a shorter game, you're still able to make use of and master the game mechanics. Boss fights in this game are implemented well; some are a breeze while others make time some retries to get through.

The Kai sections are a bit of a drag (and that was without using the motion control function). One last critique is the mesh of cultures leading to a lack of identity, as you have East Asian set pieces and characters, but with British voice actors, supplemented with a Middle Eastern-inspired OST.