Ninja Theory's new game: Enslaved

[scently]

Untrue...I am one of those people who spent countless hours playing each & every iteration of Ninja Gaiden (on every difficulty setting) and honestly the camera issue is a very very minor nuisance...all it takes is one button to reset the camera behind you...it isn't even half as big of a problem as its advocated.

The difficulty comes from the enemies who actively block & attack at each chance they get, its brutal like Demon's Souls where one wrong move means losing a major chunk of health. Sometimes its hard due to the cheapness like projectile spam in NG2, but that game is still nowhere near as hard as NG Black & that game didn't had cheap projectile spamming like NG2. The only game which I ever found to be even nearly as challenging as NG Black was DMC3 & even that game had many enemies which were slow & let you hit them.

I will always rate it like this DMC=NG > Bayonetta > GOW >>>Heavenly Sword

P.S.[Nothing like clearing a horde of enemies with Lunar's 360 or Scythe's ultimate technique ]


They will only respawn when you get back to an area & not all area will have respawning enemies.
Also you are required to shoot the archers before you cross using the hang rope, there's just two of them & you already have the bow by then...I'm surprised that you mentioned such thing as a game flaw & not your own. Majority of the game is spent killing fiends who don't use incendiary shuriken, rocket launchers or any explosives.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[Billy Idol]

Back to Enslaved:

the devs stated that the reason to choose Unreal Engine is that content creation is much easier now compared to the old framework!

I wonder if this translates into a longer Single Player campaign experience and if that was the reason that the HS campaign was rather short!?

For me, a good campaign length is 10-12 hours!

8-10 is ok as well, although I consider this a short campaign!

the 6 hours of HS, although good and very entertaining in my case are too short!

if campaign length > 12 hours, typically some repetition is involved, thus provocating the gamer to feel bored if not done carefully which is not good either (except some grinding and up-leveling is involved, then somehow I am ok with it!)

 

[JPT]

For me, a good campaign length is 10-12 hours!

8-10 is ok as well, although I consider this a short campaign!

the 6 hours of HS, although good and very entertaining in my case are too short!

I think its a bit unfair when people say its only x hours long, because most of us will use different amount of time.
I think I was about 10-11 on HS and I read a guy complained that he finished SC2 in one session.... 17h session...

 

[nightshade]

It took me ~9 hours (maybe 10) to play Heavenly Sword.
6 hour was just a myth established by the internet which the people readily adapted (as they do with many games)...its certainly longer than that.

 

[Cornsnake]

HS was about 5 to 6 hours for me. 10+ hours is what I like to see for a Single Player.

 

[Billy Idol]

Hm, you guys really needed 10 hours for HS?

I am rather sure that it only lasted about 6 hours for me...

EDIT: are you guys serious? I mean, it is a fundamental difference if a game last 6 hours or 10 hours...I cannot remember, but I typically choose 'normal" difficulty. Did you guys die a lot?

 

[RobertR1]

5-6 hours is right from HS with it being closer to 5 than 6. I have no idea how one can squeeze 10hours out of it on normal, esp if you're decent at action games.

 

[JPT]

I am nowhere close to decent in any games and usually I do not even finish games because I get bored.
Especially the HackNSlash type of games like HS etc. But HS made me keep on playing due to the cutscene story.

 

[Billy Idol]

I am nowhere close to decent in any games and usually I do not even finish games because I get bored.
Especially the HackNSlash type of games like HS etc. But HS made me keep on playing due to the cutscene story.

Yeah, the cutscenes are great...sometimes I just put it in to watch them!!
I wonder if they use again inagme graphics for the cutscenes in enslaved? I wonder if the cutscenes in enslaved are as cool though??

 

[patsu]

I remember I took about 8 hours to complete HS. Didn't try to rush through the game. I explored a few set pieces to admire the sceneries. The cannon level took quite a few retries. The most notable thing about HS was I played it in one sitting without feeling any lull or drag. The acting was indeed great attraction. Love the part where Kai swallowed the worm. XD.

 

[Sigfried1977]

I think Heavenly Sword still features the best and most satisfying story telling of all the games I played during the last 5 years or so. The pacing is great, the characters are fleshed out and likeable, acting and facial animations are still ahead of everything else, the villain is as memorable as a villain can get, the grand finale (including a truly spectacular boss battle) is epic as hell and the ending wraps everything up perfectly.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

I remember I took about 8 hours to complete HS. Didn't try to rush through the game. I explored a few set pieces to admire the sceneries. The cannon level took quite a few retries. The most notable thing about HS was I played it in one sitting without feeling any lull or drag. The acting was indeed great attraction. Love the part where Kai swallowed the worm. XD.

It took me 8 hours too, and I couldn't finish the game as my friend, who owned it, took it away to play for himself(it came in the PS3 bundle and he had not tried it yet, when he saw me playing at my place, he just yanked it away )

I think it is the most memorable game for me on my PS3(along with MGS4) as an experience ! I can never forget the eyes of Nariko, the cutscenes are most brilliant to date and the combat was fun for me. I loved playing as Kai and the well, the whole art was so well crafted , the colours so amazing, I don't think any other game, this gen, has better aesthetic sense than Heavenly Sword. It felt short only because I never wanted it to end. Everything about it, the menu, the cutscenes, the acting, the levels, the bosses were just beautiful. At some places, the gameplay became monotonous as the devs pushed a single idea for a long stretch of time, but such things can always be improved in a sequel.

I would rather have my beautiful Nariko come back again rather than jumping around as Monkey(in that "everything made of metal" Unreal Engine 3) ! Nariko is the only videogame heroine who actually matters and is not there just for her boobs. The back story and the agony of Nariko was so real, so well depicted, I really feel for her, just like I feel for Snake(the only character I care for in all of the game worlds) ! :smile:

 

[Cornsnake]

Sort of off-topic question here, but I keep hearing all this praise for HS's story and I'm wondering, am I the only one who didn't like it?

 

[JPT]

Sort of off-topic question here, but I keep hearing all this praise for HS's story and I'm wondering, am I the only one who didn't like it?

Die die you heretic

 

[patsu]

The story is simple. It's the "acting" and the villains that made the experience interesting. Kai and her After-touch helped to differentiate the game too.

 

[Cornsnake]

The story is simple. It's the "acting" and the villains that made the experience interesting.

Yeah, that's basically it. It's a shame we can't have both. With all the focus on voice acting and motion capturing a lot of game developers seem to forget that they aren't telling a very good story to begin with.

 

[Akumajou]

Yeah, that's basically it. It's a shame we can't have both. With all the focus on voice acting and motion capturing a lot of game developers seem to forget that they aren't telling a very good story to begin with.

The story in Heavenly Sword was pretty good, for a game that has to have the rating it has while featuring a female lead character.

The story while pretty good for a first year console game was not super duper mindblowing or original then again what is really can we make a comparison here? the voice acting and motion capturing combined together to deliver and make the story more of an experience than just waiting for the corny, predictable cliche hero moments and you gotta keep in mind this is from a game dev with at the time only ONE previous game under their belt and as well as a game that was released just under a year of the game console being in retail with the very limited knowledge of PS3 that now would give Ninja Theory a whole new take but yes the problem now is they are multiplatform to test the waters while using the Unreal Engine 3, a highly overrated engine but well see how it turns out. Im not buying it though, I would have preferred that they would have had a second PS3 only project hell it would have been nice if Factor 5 was still around but...

It was a real shame that Heavenly Sword got blasted as a 6 hour game with no online multiplayer and unfair comparisons (go back and read or watch the reviews, G4tv, Gametrailers, IGN, Gamespot, etc) I got the game as part of a free game with PS3 promotion, been gaming for over 10+ years and consider myself well skilled having beatend some really tough games even cheap ones yet the game took me a little over 8 hours, I could pick appart flaws but when I also come to my senses that its a near launch game it would be really nitpicking because this is cinematic action game.

But who knows she did not have Lara Croft's breasts (then again Lara has yet to have HS like graphics!!) Nariko was also not a male lead with a hood or bulky armor and the ending with its seemingly "the end?" tone could have turned reviewers off too, they tend to overcritisize yet over praise or give too much coverage to other games.

Uncharted 1 almost fell under the HS 6 hours online media curse (of anything in the first two or even up to now years of PS3 equals do not buy or bad media circus) too then again that game came out much later with a much larger installed base probably snapping it up allowing it to break even despite critisizim to get to Uncharted 2

I have been keeping a close eye on this game though, unfortunatly I am stuck in taking a wait and see how this game pans out, once the game is released i guess I'll know what Ninja Theory's scope is in making enslaved.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Does it have to be super-duper-mindblowing and twisted all the time? Usually aspirations like that tend to backfire anyway, especially in the realm of video games (whose stories seem like they were penned by giddy 14-year-olds in their basements more often than not). A straight-forward, well paced plot with sufficiently developed characters is way more than most action games could ever hope for. To me HR was kinda like Avatar, or even The Hurt Locker: simple, but incredibly satisfying because the delivery was so fantastic.

 

[Akumajou]

Does it have to be super-duper-mindblowing and twisted all the time? Usually aspirations like that tend to backfire anyway, especially in the realm of video games (whose stories seem like they were penned by giddy 14-year-olds in their basements more often than not). A straight-forward, well paced plot with sufficiently developed characters is way more than most action games could ever hope for. To me HR was kinda like Avatar, or even The Hurt Locker: simple, but incredibly satisfying because the delivery was so fantastic.

Thats kind of like what I mean, I really liked the story in Heavenly Sword, I played it in 2007 when I got my PS3 for what was supposed to be a 30 day trial (or I would return) that I used to test the console by playing non-stop for 12 hour straight sessions two days sometimes three days straight in that month that game and Ratchet and Clank Future ToD (I had never played an Insomniac Games game during PS2 years) and was very much impressed with games and console quality that I still have them to this day. Funny that earlier this year a friend was complaining to me that Heavenly Sword was too expensive as a preowned game, I checked it out and they were selling it for $40 to $35 dollars in 2010 and pre-God of War III being released. Heres hoping Sony will re-release it at a greatest hit line.

I'm confident on Enslaved to be of really good quality, but since its not a single console focused game my confidence is not the same as it would be had the game been an exclusive using a Sony developed 3d engine tools, for a game released more than three years after console launch Bayonetta left a bad taste with its lack of effort and sorry but U3 tech based multiplat games have just not impressed me enough to fork money for them, maybe Ninja Theory will change that.

And speaking of story, SW The Force Unleashed was highly, glowingly praised for its story (yet technical graphics, cinematic graphics and gameplay were atrocious) yet I played it having watched and being a SW fan, I was not impressed with all of the flaws in the story with an overpowered character running around alot of things just did not make sense, specially treating the force temptations like a joke.

 

[patsu]

I liked all the sceneries, the acting by the villians, and Kai. Also liked the humor. the part where Kai tried to get the password to the guard tower.