First things first when the game originally arrived i was very dissapointed to find that it had more damage than i would usually accept to the nice special case, i put this down to the incredibly cold weather and royal mail, although unuasually not due to them manhandling it through the letterbox, so i decided against removing a star because of that. Plus it did arrive a day early even in this time of woe... er i mean snow.
Now onto the main game, as the disc loads up you are greeted to a nice little cut scene, before the title menu, giving a somewhat vague and patchy overview of your character and the later things to come from the story, this is complimented well by a quick destroy everything on screen kill-fest when you first get into the game proper, this first section has dictation going on in the background to flesh out the history of the world rather than any particular character and allows you to get somewhat aquainted to the game play.
After this you finally, all of five minutes after loading the disc, get to the real game and are thrust into one of the very best opening levels, atleast i consider it the opening level, i have ever played. Everything about this first level is spectactular from the setting to the gameplay to the music and it serves its purpose of placing you into the character, and the games narrative perfectly.
The game seems decently difficult, about 3 levels in so far, on normal difficulty and this is the highest difficulty you can select... atleast for your first playthrough, a feature i dont really like in a lot of newer games. It also seems to be very cut-scene heavy which to me is a good thing because i like cutscenes.
overall i would give this game a 4.5/5 star rating if i could because it is simply brilliant in its execution and presentation however a few niggling things like the difficulty restriction and the incredibly awkward looking standing stance of the character, a petty thing i know, and a few more things like how even enemies your attaking dont seem to be all that effected by your attacks and can still slash away at you, but you are given a good-enough dodge system to dodge any and every attack and are rewarded for doing so well.
this compares well to others in its genre, although to be entirely honest my experience is a little thing on the ground when it comes to this type of game, the only other game of this genre i have played ninja gaiden and its sequal, although it isnt anywhere near as difficult as ninja gaiden at least so far it isnt.
The extra stuff you get with this version for no extra cost are really worth it :D, admitedly you cant buy it from play anymore due to it having sold out so in order to get this you will have to buy at a premium, the art book hasa few nice images of characters and weapons some of them however may be a bit overly sexualised but that doesnt matter too much, and if the music in the game is anything to go by the sound track is going to be brialliant, i am aware it is music from the game... :|, the only problem i can see with that is that it only has 6 tracks on it :( hopefully they're nice and long. plus it all comes in a nice and well presented complete cardboard box, not a sleeve. So for these extra pieces of goodness, originally for no extra money too, the overall package does deserve 5/5.