Asura’s Wrath Demo Impressions
Release Date: 21/2/2012
Platform: Xbox 360(Demoed), Playstation 3
Asura’s Wrath is a game where you blow up gods who are bigger than earth by punching them. Such insanity is a spectacle, with the most outrageous Dragon-Ball-Z-like battles being the norm, except here it not longer takes 3 hours to finish a single fight, it’s more like one 15 minute badass battle after another, constantly topping itself every time. It is amplified by unique character design and very nice graphics and animations.
The gameplay is oddly done, about half the fight scene that is the entire game from what I can tell, is quicktime events, except hell has frozen over, because a developer actually made them fun to perform. This is due to the button and stick movements corresponding to to the actions you Asura, the playable character, does. Rapidly press B to punch a lot or push something back, with your six metallic arms, move the sticks to grab things, and press Y to either dodge or use a more powerful punch.
The non Quicktime gameplay includes a sort of Wild Guns like shooter scene. I guess I would describe it as a 2D third person shooter, either way it’s fun, but seems fairly underdeveloped. It could be that this was an early level and you’ll get more toys to play with, but there isn’t really anything bad about it, other than the fact that Asura rarely uses projectiles out of this scene, and never in the show cutscenes, so what’s the point?
The other form is as standard third person action game where you dodge and punch thing, while keeping you enemy’s giant health bar lower than your giant health bar. It is not all that unique, with the exception of a recovery button press that you can do whenever you are hit or sent through the air. It remains jolly good thing, but maybe that’s because the location of this gameplay section is the bloody moon!
This is the kind of game that from an actual game point seems underwhelming, but the insanity of it all makes it fun at worth playing. I doubt it will justify a $60 purchase though, and it’s story seems generic after you take away the 56 pounds manly drama that the game is filled with like jelly in a doughnut. But this is a game where the earth gets impaled by a sword, so to hell with all of your logic.