Heavenly Sword

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Get the most out of Heavenly Sword

Burned through the demo already? Our six simple tips will tell you what you might be missing

Words: Mikel Reparaz, GamesRadar US

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4. Get on up
Aerial combos are our second-favorite part of the demo: just knock an enemy skyward with Nariko's chain blades, then leap up to his body and smash him a few times in midair. To pull this off, smack Triangle while in the Ranged stance to toss a baddie into the air, and then immediately jerk the Sixaxis pad upward to swoop toward him. Once you're airborne, you can pummel him with a beautiful slow-motion combo before booting him into the distance. Awesome.

5. Watch the pips
If you look at Nariko's life meter, you'll notice there are three darkened circles at the center of it. This is, for all intents and purposes, your rage meter. Build it up by fighting stylishly (completing combo chains, countering attacks, varying your styles), and the circles will light up, enabling you to pull off Superstyle attacks. If you've got one circle lit, Nariko will grab the nearest goon and instantly kill him. If you light up two, then she'll cleave him in the groin with her biggest blade, causing all nearby enemies to literally fall over from the shock. Light up all three, and you'll kill or seriously damage every enemy in the vicinity. Be careful about using that last one, though; seeing as how the demo is made up of only two small arenas, this may lead to it being over much sooner than you'd like.

6. Aftertouch for the win
This is our favorite part of the demo. Hitting the X button will pick up any inert object in the environment - which here means barrels, discarded swords and hats, bits of broken furniture and dead bodies - and hitting it again will cause Nariko to hurl whatever she's grabbed with a great deal of force. If you hold down the button, however, you can use "aftertouch" to get a close-up view of the objects and control them in flight; just tilt the Sixaxis to steer them left or right. This is endlessly entertaining, especially when you're using it to fling corpses into bad guys or off cliffs. Be aware, however, that this is almost impossible to do when you've got a bunch of guys chasing you, as they'll crowd in, attack and generally do their damnedest not to let you pick up anything, much less throw it.

Armed with that knowledge - and a will to experiment - you should be able to squeeze a lot more fun out of the demo than a simple tear-through could yield. At any rate, we hope we've given you a reason to try it again - or at all, if for some reason you own a PS3 and haven't downloaded it yet. At any rate, it should give you a better idea of what to expect come September, when the full game will lumber in with a lot more than just a couple of cramped arena fights. Expect a full preview of what lies ahead soon.