"A great action game with a fantastic story, let down by it's length."
Most of the game is fast sword combat with three different attack styles (speed, range and power) and dozens of vicious combos. Some of these trigger a gruesome finishing move usually involving a few snapped limbs. The combat is more bone crunching than blood and guts with just the occasional spurt with a well timed arrow shot or swipe of your blade. Superstyle moves, which have to be earned, generally kill everything in your vicinity and add even more flare to the already awesome scraps. Fans of the God of War Games will love this, but be warned, the combat is a bit tougher and requires you to be on your guard with lots of well timed blocks, counters and evasive rolls. Air combos require you to jerk the pad up to get Nariko to launch herself into the air, this doesn't really work and becomes quite frustrating, with no option to do it without wrestling the pad around your living room.
Some levels have you firing arrows or cannonballs while controlling their trajectory in slow motion. There is an option to do this by tilting the pad. This works surprisingly well, but it's much easier using the analogue stick. While initially tough, you'll get a real sense of achievement when you finish some of these sections, such as the crossbow section where the injured clan leader staggers for hundreds of yards to safety and you must protect him from archers and swordsmen pursuing him. A few of these sections will have you controlling Kai, a slightly demented lass with a child like innocence. Well… as innocent as a stealthy 'can-shoot-right-between-the-eyes-with-a-crossbow' kinda girl can be anyway.
The scenery and the facial animation is jaw dropping. Andy Serkis, famous for doing the motion capture for King Kong and of course Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy provides the facial motion capture and voice for the villain, King Bohan. The detail in everyone's faces during the cut-scenes is amazing and really sucks you into the gripping story. It's even fair to say that you'll be fighting through the game just to see the next well crafted cinematic.
Overall the game is brief at around 5 hours and quite easy up until the final boss, which is bastard hard. There's not much to do after completion apart from a harder difficulty setting and a few unlockables, the best of which are available for free off the PlayStation Store, mainly the amine series that describes events in the story before the game starts (well worth checking out by the way). But with great gameplay and one of the best written, visualised and acted stories ever seen in a game and the PS3's best excuse to empty the bank account for a HD TV, Heavenly Sword is essential for any action adventure fan.