Heavenly Sword should serve as a template for storytelling in action titles--possibly for games in general. This game has one of the most engaging stories of any action game I have played, and the way it is conveyed to the player through character interactions that seem so real and emotional is unparalleled.
Combat is the game's chief mechanic and it is, for the most part, very satisfying. It is a simple system in which the player has two different types of strikes which may be chained together into combos, a special move available when a meter is fully charged, and the ability to counter incoming attacks. There are also three different stances which are either more or less effective depending on the enemy type and may be mixed on the fly. My only complaint in this regard is that moving characters feels a bit clunky. The characters move a bit like tanks which is especially a problem in scenarios where Nariko has to throw an object.
QTEs: this game has them. Sometimes, they are fun; sometimes they are frustrating. It is frustrating during battles when a QTE is required to complete a battle and failing even a single button press results in zero progress or, worse still, the enemy regaining some life. Other times, it allows the player to have some interaction in a sequence he otherwise might only watch.
Framerate can sometimes be a problem in the game. I only really noticed this in the final quarter of the game. Since console games are developed to run on specific hardware, framerate issues are really inexcusable and can only mean a lack of QA or, if the problems were found in QA, a rushed final product that needed more tweaking. Especially egregious are the problems during scripted cutscenes. It makes sense that, if there are still framerate problems present, they would be during gameplay where there is some degree of serendipity in what is actually taking place, but this game doesn't want the pre-scripted scenes to be left out. In fact, the worst problems occured during cutscenes in which more than a second of the scene would be skipped over due to the console's inability to render the frames quickly enough. To its credit, the game always remained playable during gameplay sequences, and these issues only proved to be an annoyance.
In spite of some issues, this game is well worth a playthrough, and, unlike many modern games, working people have a hope of finishing this one. It's not very long, and the story pulls the player through it. All developers could take a lesson from Heavenly Sword. If those lessons could be applied to future games that are more thoroughly tested and bugfixed, the future is bright for gamers.