Preview: Asura's Wrath

Asura's Wrath is the latest action offering from Capcom and is due for a release in late February. I recently played one of the final builds and while I found it fun, there are a few worries.

First though, let me talk about the good bits. For starters, Asura's Wrath has got a brilliant style. Playing through it is exciting and makes you feel powerful. While playing it, you could easily believe you were playing through some kind of insane action movie - and while that's mainly a good thing, it leads into one of Asura's potential problems.

In the build I played, Capcom was coming dangerously close to using too many QTE's (Quick Time Events). While these are fun in moderation, you were doing them here every couple of minutes - so while it makes everything look cool, I can see it getting boring if used throughout the entire game.

The controls are also a little worrying. They were a little difficult to get the hang of at the beginning, and while I got used to them after a while, they felt clumsy at multiple occasions.

But this wasn't frequent enough to become an overwhelming flaw, it's just something that I hope Capcom can fix before bringing Asura to store shelves.

Another dodgy thing about the controls were the attack moves. It's easy to rapid fire whatever weapon it is that Asura has, as well as to lock on and fire during boss fights. But when going toe-to-toe with a regular enemy, it was difficult to know when you were attacking. This could become a major problem, unless its patched over soon.

The graphics aren't going to take your breath away, but I don't think they need to. Your mind is having way too much trouble coming to terms with the giant God trying to crush you with his ginormous thumb to care about them.

Generally, Asura's Wrath looks to be a fun, albeit mental, new IP from Capcom. The gameplay was mostly good, but let down by slightly clumsy controls and a possible over-use of QTE's. I'm hoping Capcom can tweak the controls before Asura comes to market though, and if they do then this one could be something very special.

Posted in: Game Previews, Games