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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.
Anyone who played the demo will tell you it's short. Kotaku published an opinion of it in where he timed himself at 7 minutes. That's with a death.
Most people put it at 5 minutes time range. If anything that's a red light. Now length of a demo has no bearing on the worth of the demo but the fact that you have a game of X length, and the most you're willing to show is 5 minutes should set off the warnings of anyone but the most die hard fans. What aren't they showing? The fact that 90 percent of the battles are the same? The fact there's little variety in the environment? What isn't shown here should be attracting our attentions.
Contrary to popular beliefs Demos are demonstrations of the game. We should be making value judgments off of them. They should be telling us "This game is worth your 60 dollars". The fact that this game is so short doesn't mean we are getting a small "taste". A great example is Just cause. The demo came out, it was a 15 minute stale piece of gaming. The full game came out. It was a longer piece of boring crusted gaming. Yet people were shouting during the demo "it's just a taste, buy the game before you make a judgment" This is wrong obviously.
The problem that just keeps coming up is that any game can be good for 5 minutes. Yet the fact that's all they are willing to show us when almost every other game seems to push for 15 minutes in a demo means that there's is likely some flaw that they arn't willing to show us.
Personally I'll be holding off on the game. I've been fooled once before by a "fake taste" demo and personally there's more than enough games this fall that we don't have to grasp at straws just to look good. Unless you only have a PS3 and then you might have to (Ratchet and clank looks solid, however Lair has been getting mix reactions from previews, and the rest of the crew isn't impressing). Personally I think we should be outraged at Sony for hyping a 5 minute demo so much that even slashdot publishes an article about it.