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.