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Even though Heavenly Sword has decent combat depth, everything about this game is average.
This is a God of War (GoW) kind of game. They tell a tale of epic struggle where you, as the heroin Nariko, slash your way through hordes of baddies while trying to slay the evil king. The trouble is that all the elements of the game come together and amount to not much of anything special.
Like GoW, the game features a fixed camera, which occasionally pulls back to reveal a sweeping vista with beautiful art. Unlike GoW, however, the landscapes and scenery in Heavenly Sword are meaningless. Where GoW showed the landscapes as major components of the story telling, Heavenly Sword tosses them up simply to occupy space.
The game also features a combat system with some depth, but ultimately fails to really harness that system for a rewarding experience. Of the three "stances", weak, medium, and heavy, I found weak to be almost entirely useless. You can very nearly defeat every foe by relentlessly hammering the triangle button, which also handles counter-attacks.
Before I get accused of having nothing good to say, let me point out some of the more memorable aspects of the game. Flying Fox and the King are excellent characters with some wonderful dialog early on. Truly excellent stuff! Sadly, most of this is lost in the second half of the game and they slip into generic archetypal roles with nothing interesting to say.
Also on the subject of characters, Roach is the most moving character in the game. I do not want to spoil anything, but suffice to say that this character stands out the most, even though his story is fairly generic.
The game also has some shooting levels and they make good use of the sixaxis controller to allow you to pilot the projectiles. I generally liked the shooting feature, with the exception of the first time it is used, which is in a forest. I found that it was too hard to scan back and forth to shoot at bad guys.
Lastly, UI and loading issues. The UI was not particularly friendly. The worst case is the fact that it is impossible to access special features from the main menu. Also, the load times were HORRIFYING in this game.
As you can see, just about every good aspect of Heavenly Sword is either offset by something slightly negative, or just fails to achieve more than average. That ends up being the bottom line of this game, it is simply average.
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