Heavenly One-sitting
PostPosted:Sat Sep 22, 2007 3:47 pm
Alright, so I beat heavenly sword last night in one sitting. The last game that I was able to do this with was Super Metroid on the VC because I had played it over and over and over when I was a kid. It was a very pretty game, graphics were immaculate and the camera (which was out of your control) had a nice way of making the game look extra-showy. The combat system was pretty fun with 3 different styles to use the sword in (as it was all transformy) in addition to playing with Kai and using a regular sword with Nariko. The specials and counters were cool looking and very well thought out.
Okay, now to the bad. It was maybe 5 hours of gameplay, and you were alternating between killing hordes of enemies with essentially the same moves (I didn't even look at the combo list, I simply mashed the buttons THE WHOLE GAME) or shooting them with a cannon, rocket launcher, or cannon and then manipulating the flight of the projectile with the sixaxis controller. I'm sure that this is probably the coolest thing to most people, but I enjoy playing my games from a relaxed slouchy posture which is apparently not conducive with the controller. The wii's controller seems a-okay with my sitting any way I desire as long as like my leg is not in between the censor bar and the controller. It was certainly cool to angle an arrow around a corner and impale it into a hiding enemy, so all in all, not entirely a bad experience. The situations where you had to hit buttons in context with a cinematic (a la god of war or RE4) in order to not die and mess up a boss seemed much less exciting and seemed really disjointed. There were parts where you had to press the analog stick in different directions to navigate nariko up some rocks or obstacles, but other than that, it just seemed like "you haven't been doing anything for a while, why not hit a button in this situation" that didn't really leave you with the sense of satisfaction as in RE4 or god of war.
The game also froze on me during the second chapter. It was actually the level in the demo and when you're done running through a context sensitive button hitting situation, you kick a large fellow off a tower and then the loud sound of the kick just kept looping and I paused it, and unpaused it to see if the sound would stop.... it certainly did not, so I quit to the main menu and the game just froze. Lame. Nariko's hair also would just fall in front of her face during the excruciatingly detailed MoCap sequences and would just stay there..... masking her face all weird like. Pretty much all scripted sequences like this were plagued by either her hair getting in the way of something very awkwardly or fabric from clothes hanging very disjointedly and jumped around very bugg-ily. Sound from the game would cut out alot, and I would be very impressed when the game would run up higher than 20fps, as it seemed like it was down to very Shadow of the Colossus levels of frames per second. This became especially annoying during the last boss battle (which was admittedly super cool during the first phase and just became progressively annoying and repetitive). The drop in frames came most abruptly when there were a zillion characters on screen. You'd wade into the opposing army and it seemed like there were thousands of characters on the screen, which was cool, but why did they do this at the cost of the frames? You were basically in the midst of the enemy army during the final boss battle and this just destroyed the frame count..... WHY? This game just seemed like it went straight from concept to game without any playtesting or a beta phase to get all the bugs out. This seems to be the case with most of the exclusives that have come out for the ps3 (motorstorm, lair, and Resistance: fall of man, and warhawk).
Let me talk about warhawk for a second. I'm pretty sure you guys don't own a ps3, so I'm sure you haven't heard about the game-breaking (in my opinion) problem that occurred with that game for the first 2 weeks. The servers did not record your stats during ranked games. It would give people ranks that had nothing to do with their points (when it did record stats, and the ranks were usually WAY higher than it should be), and this caused me to stop playing altogether until they fixed it, which they did earlier this week. The problem was apparently the game-starved ps3 audience bought this game like madcrazy and the server load was too much for them.
So anyway, in conclusion... you should rent this game as it does some cool things, but it is plagued with terribleness. If you are dead-set on buying it, I recommend waiting for patches to come out before you can actually extract some semblance of enjoyment from this game. The end.
Okay, now to the bad. It was maybe 5 hours of gameplay, and you were alternating between killing hordes of enemies with essentially the same moves (I didn't even look at the combo list, I simply mashed the buttons THE WHOLE GAME) or shooting them with a cannon, rocket launcher, or cannon and then manipulating the flight of the projectile with the sixaxis controller. I'm sure that this is probably the coolest thing to most people, but I enjoy playing my games from a relaxed slouchy posture which is apparently not conducive with the controller. The wii's controller seems a-okay with my sitting any way I desire as long as like my leg is not in between the censor bar and the controller. It was certainly cool to angle an arrow around a corner and impale it into a hiding enemy, so all in all, not entirely a bad experience. The situations where you had to hit buttons in context with a cinematic (a la god of war or RE4) in order to not die and mess up a boss seemed much less exciting and seemed really disjointed. There were parts where you had to press the analog stick in different directions to navigate nariko up some rocks or obstacles, but other than that, it just seemed like "you haven't been doing anything for a while, why not hit a button in this situation" that didn't really leave you with the sense of satisfaction as in RE4 or god of war.
The game also froze on me during the second chapter. It was actually the level in the demo and when you're done running through a context sensitive button hitting situation, you kick a large fellow off a tower and then the loud sound of the kick just kept looping and I paused it, and unpaused it to see if the sound would stop.... it certainly did not, so I quit to the main menu and the game just froze. Lame. Nariko's hair also would just fall in front of her face during the excruciatingly detailed MoCap sequences and would just stay there..... masking her face all weird like. Pretty much all scripted sequences like this were plagued by either her hair getting in the way of something very awkwardly or fabric from clothes hanging very disjointedly and jumped around very bugg-ily. Sound from the game would cut out alot, and I would be very impressed when the game would run up higher than 20fps, as it seemed like it was down to very Shadow of the Colossus levels of frames per second. This became especially annoying during the last boss battle (which was admittedly super cool during the first phase and just became progressively annoying and repetitive). The drop in frames came most abruptly when there were a zillion characters on screen. You'd wade into the opposing army and it seemed like there were thousands of characters on the screen, which was cool, but why did they do this at the cost of the frames? You were basically in the midst of the enemy army during the final boss battle and this just destroyed the frame count..... WHY? This game just seemed like it went straight from concept to game without any playtesting or a beta phase to get all the bugs out. This seems to be the case with most of the exclusives that have come out for the ps3 (motorstorm, lair, and Resistance: fall of man, and warhawk).
Let me talk about warhawk for a second. I'm pretty sure you guys don't own a ps3, so I'm sure you haven't heard about the game-breaking (in my opinion) problem that occurred with that game for the first 2 weeks. The servers did not record your stats during ranked games. It would give people ranks that had nothing to do with their points (when it did record stats, and the ranks were usually WAY higher than it should be), and this caused me to stop playing altogether until they fixed it, which they did earlier this week. The problem was apparently the game-starved ps3 audience bought this game like madcrazy and the server load was too much for them.
So anyway, in conclusion... you should rent this game as it does some cool things, but it is plagued with terribleness. If you are dead-set on buying it, I recommend waiting for patches to come out before you can actually extract some semblance of enjoyment from this game. The end.