Heavenly Sword Demo Out

Thursday saw the release of the Heavenly Sword demo on the PlayStation network. Kotaku has impressions from the play experience and GamesRadar offers up some helpful tips to make the most of the short playtime. From Kotaku's rundown: 'Seven minutes, and it ends just like that. No big boss fight to try out, no giant plot revelation, no finding an ancient artifact. Just, "here comes more enemies, see you in two months!" You know that feeling you get when you're about to sneeze and then can't? Exactly the feeling I got here. As for aesthetics, the graphics were solid but the framerate was erratic at times. Sound was excellent no matter which language option I chose in order to stretch out my playtime a little by pretending I was a different guy from another country. By far the best aspect of the whole demo for me, the music was completely top notch. Very atmospheric and brilliantly arranged. ' Back at Kotaku, Brian Crecente received a longer version of the demo than the one publicly available, and is now playing through it live over the internet.

Beautiful graphics, but I have some complaints...

[Hamster Lover]

The game looks very, very good. The frame rate at the very start of the demo is a bit inconsistent with noticeable tearing, but through the rest of the demo the frame rate seemed rock solid. The combat has elements of button mashing, but I guess that happens with games of this nature until you get the combos down. My only other criticism is that I just couldn't get the motion controls down at all, so I turned them off. Again, that probably has more to do with my lack of mastery of the controls than anything else, but I would be curious to know if anyone else had the same problem.

The game feels very much like a ninja version of God of War, as they share many of the same elements: context sensitive mini games, vicious combat, finishing moves, swarming enemies and stunning locations. I wasn't all that excited for this game before the demo, but I am now. A definite release day purchase.