From practically the moment its name was first uttered with hushed reverence by Sony reps, Heavenly Sword has been touted as a real showcase for what the PS3 can do, a role it steps into with ease. Its visuals are a stunning display of elegant power, as characters move with liquid grace through intricately detailed vistas of breathtaking beauty. It is glorious to behold, a standard-bearer for the possibilities presented by this next generation of gaming hardware. It’s just such a shame that you actually have to play Heavenly Sword to get to watch it.

The Heavenly Sword of the game’s title is a Sharp Thing of Doom guarded by the soon to be Goddess of War Nariko and her father’s clan. Dad has issues with his daughter, because she had the audacity to be born female when the clan’s prophecy clearly calls for a male warrior to heft the Sword and defend the world from Evil. To wield the Sword is to forfeit your life, but that doesn’t prevent various nefarious types from trying to get their hands on it, including King Bohan who is more than happy to kill everyone in between him and the blade. When Bohan captures Nariko’s father Shen, she pretty much says “Eff it,” picks up the Sword and makes with the slicing and dicing.

The story isn’t going to win any awards for creativity, but the cutscenes that tell it are mesmerizing, just the same. The developers went through absurdly painstaking motion capture sessions to make the characters of Heavenly Sword move like real people, and the effort shows. Tiny movements of eyebrow or cheek convey subtle emotions as the scenes play out. The lip synching is absolutely perfect, and when combined with the exceptional voice acting of the cast (Andy Serkis is particularly brilliant as Bohan), it is easy to forget that you are watching a video game.

Until the scene ends and you have to begin whaling away on the square and triangle buttons, that is. Heavenly Sword’s gameplay can be summed up thusly: upon your entry into a semi-enclosed area, several waves of generic, faceless enemies will attempt to do you harm. You will respond to their efforts by mashing buttons with wild abandon. You can mix up the mashing into combos, dabbling with the differences between ranged, light, and heavy attacks, but the patina of variety wears thin fairly quickly after you’ve sent the umpteenth enemy soldier to great beyond.

Making the hand-to-hand just a bit more aggravating is your lack of control over the camera. Ok, that’s not entirely accurate: you do have a modicum of control over your view. You can swing the camera left and right by holding down the shoulder buttons, but it reels like a drunken sailor suffering from an inner ear infection and rarely actually helps you see anything, so really, it’s best to just pretend you can’t move the darn thing at all. The locked view isn’t a hardship when you’re confronting a small handful of enemies, but when their numbers increase it virtually guarantees you’ll wind up on the receiving end of more than one cheap shot you couldn’t possibly have seen coming.

The combat sequences are interspersed up with Aftertouch events that are great in theory, but dreadfully aggravating in practice. Although Nariko tends to rely on her Sword in combat situations, occasionally, she, or her charmingly wacko sidekick Kai, is called upon to launch some kind of projectile, like a cannonball or an arrow. By holding down the square button, you can tilt the Sixaxis controller to put some English on the projectile after its launch, guiding it more precisely to its final destination. In theory. In practice, the difference in controller movement that leads to a tiny nudge and one that sends your arrow wildly off course is negligible and completely random.

For all its flaws, Heavenly Sword is still somewhat satisfying. Perhaps its short length (just ten hours or so) keeps the button-mashing from becoming overwhelmingly repetitious. Perhaps Nariko’s sexily smoky voice and gorgeous hair is just distracting enough to take your mind off the annoying camera? Perhaps the cutscenes are so enjoyable to watch that they make up for the uninspired gameplay? Whatever the cause, the result is that Heavenly Sword is an adequate, if repetitious, hack-and-slash, and given the dearth of decent original games on the PS3, that’s better than nothing.