A Series of Tubes

In an almost total contrast to LocoRoco, I also recently acquired Heavenly Sword, the cinematic sword-slasher recently released for PS3.

The game is epic, and very fun. The battle system is not that hard to use, though combos require perfect timing to get them right. ‘Forms’ (Speed, Power, and Regular) are a bit confusing at first, but once you realize that an enemy with a blue aura needs to be fought with Speed, and one with yellow needs Power, it’s pretty simple to use the forms. It takes a bit of messing around (and a lot of dying) to figure out that an enemy glowing red is doing an unblockable attack, and you need to move or you’re gonna take serious damage.

The AfterTouch features are my absolute favorite thing in the entire game. This is when you are using any sort of projectile (arrows, cannonballs, or actually anything you pick up and throw), you can use the SIXAXIS to guide it as it flies though the air. The first time you get this option (or the first time the game explains how to use it), you are playing as a sniper, guarding your clan’s fort. It’s pretty fun, except that the area is too dark to pick out your enemies, and you are at too close a range for the AfterTouch to work. In the next episode, however, Bohan is moving catapults towards your base, and you have to use a cannon to destroy them (via the handy weak points on the front with giant red targets painted on them). This episode is where you get SIXAXIS awesomeness, since the cannonball has something like 20 seconds in the air before making contact, allowing for plenty of AfterTouch corrections.

The storyline in the game, like I said before, is cinematic. As in, the game is like watching a movie. You play through a very fluid chronology of events surrounding the end of Nariko’s life (or…is it?really, really creepy animated using motion capture, meaning that they move and speak very realistically. All the directing for the mo-cap actors was done by Andy Sirkus, the actor famous for doing the voice and mo-cap for Gollum/Smeagol in Lord of The Rings, and pretty much every feature involving mo-cap since then. He also plays the villain of the game, King Bohan.

Anyway yeah, very fun game. I’d recommend buying it to anyone with a PS3.