As well as chaining combos and pulling off bone-breaking counters you can also use Nariko’s Super Stylin’ meter to kick ass. An inset of her health bar, this provides three devastating attacks. Firstly Nariko can perform a spine-dancing number on a single enemy. Or she can leap into the air, with the enemy impaled on her blades, slam to the ground and take out all those around her. Finally, she can break into a whirlwind attack wiping out everyone in the vicinity. And like the rest of the combat in Sword, these special moves look absolutely cracking, which is why you’ll find yourself methodically attacking enemies, chaining combos, waiting for that exact moment to pull off a nasty counter and filling up that bar for when you need it most.

Kai’s shot-focused missions help mix the gameplay up a bit, however, some of these missions do drag on - especially the one when we had to protect her father, Shen as he made his way across a bridge of Bohan’s troops. After you’ve launched an arrow, you’re thrown into “Aftertouch” mode - a bullet-time of sorts that allows you to control Kai’s arrows for pin-point accuracy.

It looks great and the payoff is even more rewarding when you hit someone right between the eyes or in the knees. This method of attack does sometimes slow the pacing down to a crawl when there are hordes of troops, leaving you yearning for a wallop of Nariko’s blades. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that Ninja Theory has included a little too many Kai-based missions when it should have been focusing on the real star of Heavenly Sword, Nariko.

And yet that’s where the game begins to unravel. Sure, the combat is truly next-gen, the game is as beautiful as you’d have hoped for and Nariko is as awesome as expected, but it feels way too short. We reached the end of the game in less than a day and were left feeling short-changed by the experience. We craved extra brawls with bigger bad guys, a few more puzzles plus extra missions that would have really stretched our skills.