While the demo to this game was borderline pointless, it doesn’t stand up to the game in the slightest. True all the mechanics there and some lines of dialogue that can be misconstrued as something a little perverse, but in the end it’s a poor demo.
The game itself, well Ms.Kratos….sorry Nariko, has 2 different attacks, strong and weak. Combined with the impressively smooth change over to the different styles can make for some impressive death inducing fun. Sometimes the combat can be a bit unfair and sometimes resorting to the good old tried and tested method of button mashing is sometimes better then organised combo’ing.
Story wise, it seems to be a movie made interactive. Some people complained that MGS 4 was a movie with some gameplay, just this is a bit more well “meshed” together. Using the ingame engine, which is really quite robust. There is no pop-ins, there is sometimes some intersecting of polygons but that is understandable when most of the time it’s Nariko’s hair doing it. Which seems to defy all forms of gravity.
The story follows the main arc of, baddy appears, baddy wants to kill your group / town / nation. You must stop him blah blah blah and so forth. A bit over done, but the main heroine (Yay for proper female leads) has taken up the “Heavenly Sword” which basically is a giant sword of power, the side affect of it is that its actually killing her while she uses it. She does it to get revenge and to stop mr baddy. Most of the story is revealed through cut scenes and dialogue. The cut scene animation is done through motion capture, which lends itself to the engaging story. Sometimes the voice acting seems more funny then actually being serious, but there is no real fault to it.
Another section of the game play is “Kai”, Nariko’s friend who carries a giant automatic crossbow. One of the sections that was enjoyable with Kai, was when you were protecting someone escaping from a random building. It gave you chance to mess with the six-axis a bit more then previous times where six-axis control proved useful. Also I found I enjoyed these moments a lot more then the Nariko bits, seems the whole humour budget got poured into the Kai sections. Even jokes about other PS3 games are there.
Graphically the game is well as I have said, very “movie-esk”. It is a beautiful world they have created and looks gorgeous in HD. Music is nothing inspiriing, but kicks in at the right moments. Voice acting, well for the english version at least is utterly terrible. The number of enemies the game shows is immense, hundreds and hundreds of blood crazed soldiers charging down a hill towards you is something that needs to be done more often.
It is an enjoyable game I will give it that. The length is only thing I can find wrong with it really. Gameplay is different from God of War to the extent that it is not really hard for God of War veterans to get the hand of easily, just it is a bit more forgiving in the difficulty.
