SplitScreenGaming — Impressions

Impressions | Asura’s Wrath Demo

The demo for Asura’s Wrath is now available on PSN and Xbox Live and consists of two chapters and gives you a good idea of how the game will play out.

First things first, Asura’s Wrath looks amazing, anime style cel shading with some great lighting and shading effects really bring the characters to life. It is something the creators, CyberConnect2, should be used to as they are the makers of the past few Naruto games another series that had really nice graphics.

Another thing it borrows from Anime is the ridiculous over the top events and puts them into some jaw-dropping set pieces, it is just a shame that a lot of the first chapter you get to play (chapter 5: Hollow Victory) mainly consists of a lot of quick-time event based gameplay. The worst thing is the timing based quick-time events don’t even seem to matter if you miss them or not. The quick time events are broken up by turret like sequences that involve dodging obstacles whilst running forwards and shooting the enemy. It isn’t very interesting and just serves as a distraction from the massive set pieces that give this game its appeal. The second chapter you get to play (chapter 11: The Final Lesson) has more of a combat-based stage where you fight one on one with a boss. There is no life bar, but rather a burst meter that you build up to move onto the next part of the fight and into a quick-time event. This is much more appealing and feels like No More Heroes but with very slightly deeper combat and a better pacing to the fight without the drawn out fights becoming too repetitive.

This is a very promising demo and if the full game has the perfect balance between the combat and the quick-time events I think it could be forgiven for its focus on the huge set-pieces and the sacrifices to gameplay needed to pull off these type of set-pieces. Oh, and that last part of the fight with the guy with the sword has to be the craziest sequence I have ever seen in a video game.

The demo for Asura’s Wrath is now available for PSN and Xbox Live Gold Subscribers.