Thursday night (Glen isn’t playing football edition)
Seeing as how Dan and Bill have NCAA and All Pro covered for the moment, I figured I would talk about the Heavenly Sword demo that came out on the Playstation 3 today.
First off, the game has absolutely stunning visuals. The amount of facial detail on Mariko is absolutely amazing. The amount of emotion that they are able to show in her face is something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a game before.
I know a lot of people are calling the game Goddess of War at this point, but in my short time with the game, I just can’t agree with that. You can hammer away at Square and Triangle and be effective for very short periods of time, but if you keep trying to do that the massive amount of enemies will crush you in no time. It becomes clear, very quickly, that in order to succeed in this game you’ll have to master it’s counter and combo system.
I’ve played through the demo four times now and I’ve found that I’m having more fun trying to time out my counters just to see some of the wickedly destructive things that Mariko will do to the enemies. There are counters that kill an enemy with a single hit. There are counters that send them flying into the air, which when you can combine with a Sixaxis lift will allow you to string together a combo that will kill them before they hit the ground. Then there are the Superstyle attacks that can wipe out an entire group of enemies in a few seconds.
But what’s really surprising to me is the fact that they say this demo is based off an early build and the newest builds of the game look and control better.
A few weeks ago, I asked for people’s opinions as to which games I should pre-purchase at Gamestop. After playing this demo, I got my answer.
July 27th, 2007 at 3:13 am
You do have to learn combos and the nuances of the stance but you can beat it using triangle mostly and evading attacks.
I do miss the dedicated jump from God of War. And in that game, I don’t remember having to learn combos so much as jumping in the air to avoid attacks or to use for attacks.
I haven’t messed too much with using the motion for jumping in the air yet. Will have to see how that goes. Did they substitute a jump button to support the SIXAXIS?
Like I was saying, I don’t remember combos from GoW so much. I think that game relied on using simultaneous button presses and getting new moves/attacks and upgraded weapons over time.
Wonder if we’ll get that, new attacks and the sword doing more damage over time.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:00 am
It’s not that they made the Sixaxis a replacement for the jump button because the Sixaxis doesn’t do anything if you’re just standing there and move it upwards. It only works as a jump if there is an enemy up in the air that you can combo.
Looking at the combo menu, it looks as though you’ll be earning new combos throughout the game. Whether you buy them in a store, or you gain them by doing certain things, I don’t know.
You’re right that you can beat the game by mostly using triangle, but I don’t think it would be nearly as much fun to do that.