Heavenly Sword which all PS3 owners were looking for got a decent from very biased reviewers.
Had this been a Wii game and reviewed by the Wii editors of IGN I imagine the game would have gotten a 6, the PS3 editors do a good job of pointing out the games faults, while keeping civil, and making it seem like it's not too bad. However if you read in between the lines, you can see that this game isn't worth the Charmin Ultra Softs the developers used to wipe their butts:
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The story isn't exactly the deepest thing we've ever witnessed, but the presentation helps give it weight that wouldn't necessarily have felt like it was there otherwise.
No story, but somehow the graphics make up for it...
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While the combat mechanics are generally quite strong, Heavenly Sword relies on them far too much to carry the excitement through to the end. You'll quickly find that you're fighting the same battles time and time again, and that there isn't much variety in what you need to do. Sure, you have a large number of combos at your disposal, but the actual battles are largely the same.
Part of the problem is that aside from the bosses, you really only fight the same soldier types for most of the game. There's the basic soldier, the heavily armored soldier, guys with bows and some ninjas. There are one or two other enemy types to fight at certain spots, but they're few and far between. Most of these enemies are introduced early on in the game, and you'll fight them until the very end.
Good combat "mechanics", but combat itself is generic and repeating...
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Another issue is that a number of the skirmishes are essentially arena battles where you wind up trapped in a room and need to fend off swarm after swarm of enemies. This just makes it feel like you're trudging through that section of the game and that the designers are keeping you put for a while to rack up the overall game time. Whereas better-paced titles will have you constantly moving forward as you fight, or at least reward you with a new item in these cases, with Heavenly Sword it feels as if your progression is oftentimes paused as you fight off a number of enemies before progressing with nothing new to show for it.
Trying to make the game longer with unimportant, unwanted, and halting dungeons. I assume that when he says "better-paced titles" he means games like Zelda, where you are always rewarded for your hard work.
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There's one section in particular where you must use a crank to raise a large statue and then bounce a shield off it and into another button before the statue lowers back down to the ground. With every miss you need to go back over and spend time raising the statue back up again. This is a very small example and wouldn't necessarily reflect poorly on the game on its own, but there are a number of somewhat similar parts that do make the experience a little frustrating at times.
Another example of how bad the gameplay is.
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But there are a few sniper sections that simply go on for far too long as using Aftertouch to properly steer her arrows slows the game to a crawl. The concept is cool, but when you need to snipe soldier after soldier after soldier with little to no challenge, it just gets old fast.
He's referring to parts of the game where you play as another character, and guess what? The gameplay
STILL sucks.
Even though I have no intention of buying a PS3 I was looking forward to this game, now all that is left really is MGS4.
Topic: PS3's Killer App Gets A 7.0 (decent) From IGN (Read 32796 times)
