The Stranger Than Heaven demo was fun, but I expected something else

Why do you play Yakuza games? Probably for the story, right? A massive story about the Japanese underworld, with complex characters and even more complex activities, that draws you in for dozens of hours. So it makes sense to build a demo for a new game in the series entirely around action and nothing else, right? Definitely not, but that’s life. I can’t say the Gamescom demo for Stranger Than Heaven was disappointing, but the game looks so rich that including just three fights and nothing else in the demo feels like a missed opportunity.

And on paper, it already sounds great. The game is supposed to offer an entirely new gameplay experience unlike anything we’ve seen from RGG Studio so far. It will cover 50 years of the Japanese underworld’s history – 5 decades, 5 stories and 5 locations. It will tell the story of Daito, who is looking for a place where he can belong. He finds it in organized crime and later forms his own group. You will follow all of this between 1915-1965, complemented by a star-studded Japanese and American cast featuring Yu Shirota, Snoop Dogg, as well as late stars Bunta Sugawara and even Tupac Shakur. That’s something you simply want to experience!

But Sega doesn’t want to show us that yet. I understand that it wants to build anticipation and avoid spoilers, but it still could have given us something. What did we get in the demo? 3 streets, 3 action scenes, and it was over in 10 minutes. We could only catch a glimpse of the main character’s life in three different periods – 1915 in Kokura, 1929 in Kure and 1943 in Osaka. Enemies were waiting for us in all of them, and we had to beat, stab or kick them into submission. In real time.

The game will offer 13 types of weapons at launch, but only 3 were available in the demo, one of them being his bare fists. We also had a knife and a massive hammer in our pocket. Attacks are divided between the right and left sides of the body and are controlled with the triggers and bumpers. This lets you alternate between sides and create combos. Defense is handled by blocking with the B button on an Xbox controller, but blocking must be directional – so you use the bumpers for that as well. You can also dodge. In two of the three sections, enemies attacked us from multiple directions, so all of this came in handy. And in the last one? There was just a single enemy, but he was deadly and armed with a katana.

Even one good hit meant death there, so you couldn’t give the enemy even the slightest chance. He can knock you to the ground, at which point you have to dodge, or try to land a well-timed kick, but that requires precise timing. The weapon you choose and its properties also play an important role. You won’t even have time to swing the hammer against that lightning-fast katana wielder, but it’s extremely useful against a group of 4 surrounding you. I tried some of the fights several times; after all, we had an hour to play the game. That made it all the more surprising how short the demo we received was. But the action can draw you in, and there’s a fair amount of skill and variety to it. If only they had included at least a few fragments of the story...

Technologically, it isn’t the best-looking game on the market. Quite the opposite, in fact – it looks somewhat dated. On the other hand, it makes up for that with a well-chosen art style that nicely imitates genre films and actually suits the game. And when you reach Osaka at night, lit up by lights and drenched in rain, you’ll really enjoy it. We played the game with Japanese voice acting, of which there wasn’t much, but it will once again be high quality. So far, only Yu Shirota has made a good impression. Now all that’s left is to wait until January 15 for the most important part.