Ninja Theory’s Tameem Antoniades and Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis, who brings a mighty motion capture performance to Heavenly Sword, popped along to the Three Speech event at 3Rooms last week, answering a bunch of questions from those in attendance.
Read on for their thoughts on cut scenes, Blu-Ray, emotional engagement, the making of Heavenly Sword and more.
More and more Heavenly Sword reviews are emerging on online gaming sites – most recent are IGN UK / US, Gamepro and EGM. Here’s a round up of most of the review scores so far. They’re quite a mixed bunch, such is the subjective nature of reviewing.
Edge Magazine: 60%
IGN UK: 7/10 (70%)
IGN US: 7/10 (70%)
PSW: 80%
EGM: 8, 8, 9 (85%)
Gamepro: 4.5/5 (90%)
Play Magazine: 100%
You can find what Three Speech thought of the game here. Also in Heavenly Sword news, we’ve got a bunch of new screenshots to share fresh from the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany
Confirmed retail release dates for Heavenly Sword are September 14 in the UK with the rest of Europe following on September 19.
Some confirmed/almost confirmed release dates for you…
Warhawk They’re “aiming for” for August 28 on the PSN, at what we think is a very decent price of £19.99. The retail version, bundled with a Jabra bluetooth headset, is due September 21 at £39.99.
Heavenly Sword is due September 14.
Folklore - TBC, but the plan is October 12.
Lair - Also TBC, but the plan is October 26.
Hope to be back with more news before the day’s out.
A quick random but interesting bit of info for you: according to Develop Mag, out of the Heavenly Sword Blu-ray disc, a whopping 10GB is taken up by the sound effects and music alone. That includes three and a half hours of music, and four and a half thousand lines of dialogue. Looks like when ‘Chief Design Ninja’ Tameem Antoniades said that Heavenly Sword couldn’t be done with DVD, he wasn’t joking!
[Develop Mag]
As one of the games showcased pre-launch, Heavenly Sword, developed by Brit outfit Ninja Theory, has always been hotly anticipated. However, we’ll admit to being slightly worried about it – it always looked great, but would its sword-fighting gameplay cut the mustard? At last, we’ve got hold of pretty complete preview code and from the moment we popped it into our debug, our worries melted away. There’s no doubt it will be held up as an example of the sort of killer games the PS3 so badly needs when it arrives in the shops in September.
Here’s the vid that we linked to below.
Dying for some more Heavenly Sword action before its release? Check out this video – an animation of the background story to Heavenly Sword. The first of the five videos, titled “Legend of the Sword”, details where the Heavenly Sword itself originated. Definitely worth a watch for anyone looking forward to the game.
There’s a good review of the E3 Killzone 2 demo event over on the US PlayStation blog, in which Colin Benett of the Gamer Advisory Panel has some great stuff to say about the new Guerilla title.
Read the review here
