As gasps faded and confused murmuring began filling the Dolby Theatre following Tupac's reveal, one thing became clear: Stranger Than Heaven was living up to its name. Whether it was Snoop Dogg, Tupac, or RGG’s storied history with the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series that brought you here, Stranger Than Heaven is looking to deliver an experience unlike anything the ambitious developers have delivered thus far – and it all starts with the combat.

I previewed Stranger Than Heaven’s robust new combat system at Summer Game Fest earlier this month, featuring three difficulties that culminated with the hardest ‘Advanced’ fight against an extremely skilled swordsman. Even with my Yakuza experience, it was tough.

Combat That Just Might Click

I sat down at my preview station with an innocent smile on my face, unaware of what I was getting into. I’m a huge fan of the Yakuza series, so as the title screen faded, and I loaded into the first area, marked ‘beginner’, memories of Like A Dragon: Ishin danced through my head. However, despite its retro setting, Stranger Than Heaven is nothing like Ishin or any other RGG game, and its combat is at the forefront of reasons why.

The primary emphasis is on using the right and left sides of your controller to control each side of Daito’s body. If someone grabbed your right arm, the best way to break free was to swing with your left hand. Simple enough in theory, but much more nuanced in practice.

As I got set up, I caught a glimpse of the person next to me connecting with haymakers on a group of thugs. Beginner mode seemed easy enough. But then, as I stepped up to the plate to face my own group, my periphery noticed his screen fading to black as ‘Game Over’ pierced through the darkness of his failed attempt. At this moment, I sensed that I was cooked. But I took his failure as a warning and was able to deftly dispatch two foes to thin the small crowd facing me.

Dividing and conquering quickly became the recipe for success, while I spun my camera wildly to keep an eye on the main, much larger baddie. This strategy was essential for the first fight, and saved me from a near-death during the second encounter against another strong group of enemies. Although picking off foes one at a time was a helpful plan for the first two encounters, it proved useless for the third ‘Advanced’ fight against a solo swordsman.

I took a few confident steps toward my adversary with a short knife in my right hand – badly out-ranged by the swordsman’s katana. A few stabs barely scratched the surface of his health gauge, depleting maybe two percent of his life. In a flash, he caught me in a grapple and impaled me with a fatal flourish – the Game Over screen was no longer in my periphery, but staring me right in the face. I wiped my hands and leaned forward in my chair – this difficulty was not messing around.

The next time up, I spent almost no time attacking, instead opting to learn my enemy’s move set and attack only after dodging or blocking a slash. Slowly, I started to make progress at whittling down what seemed like a never-ending health pool.

Dodge-punish-block-back up. I got into a rhythm and pushed the swordsman to the brink, as he clung to roughly 30 percent of his health. Suddenly, I got caught in a grapple and witnessed the same grapple-and-stab animation that killed me before finishing me off yet again.

As I wiped my now-sweaty hands on my clothes and took off my headset to regroup, one of the PR staff members setting up the previews tapped me on the shoulder. “You’re catching on really quickly,” he said, smiling. With renewed confidence, I jumped back in… and failed again. And again. I probably died four more times until I figured out how to avoid the swordsman’s signature killing blow and eventually landed a final blow of my own.

I slid the headset off again to let out a sigh and clutch my fist with a celebratory fist pump. A symphony of claps echoed behind me as I turned to see three of the PR folks gathered behind me with grins on their faces. “Soak it in,” they told me. As I looked around, I realized why they said this – I was the only person in the session to beat the Advanced difficulty.

Is RGG Forcing You To Get Good?

If you’re wondering whether your only options are to skip the game or git gud, the short answer is not exactly. The longer answer is ‘yes’ – if you want to play on the game’s most challenging mode. However, while the other two difficulties offer a decent challenge, they don’t require you to get good, per se – they require you to play smart. While many previous RGG titles could be beaten by button-mashing dodges and attacks at random, Stranger Than Heaven rewards playing strategically to counter the situation at hand.

If an enemy grabs your right arm, mashing the RB or RT on your controller won’t help much – you need to use your free left hand. Similarly, if you’re facing off against five enemies, running into the center and spamming attacks will get you tossed around, even if you manage to knock one of them out.

However, that’s not to say that it’s easy to click with Stranger Than Heaven’s new take on fighting. When I sought out another RGG fan I met at Summer Game Fest, their face reflected a bitter disappointment. “I wasn’t a fan of it, to be honest. It was too hard for me,” they lamented. While I left with a positive impression, thanks to the fun conclusion to my demo, it made me reflect on how hard I had to try just to get through a few fights.

I really am not exaggerating when I say my hands were sweating by the time I finally beat the hardest challenge they’d prepared. And for a single-player game from a developer with a wide range of fans, this felt more like their answer to Elden Ring than a bold new take on organized crime.

While it would be easy to pick a side and condemn or praise the combat based on my experience or that of my colleagues, I think the difficulty is more nuanced than that. For example, we didn’t face that final Swordsman on Beginner difficulty, so what might the fight have looked like if that were the case? Would the HP be much lower? How much damage would that grapple-and-stab move do to me? There’s a lot to consider.

But, Stranger Than Heaven’s demo made one thing absolutely clear about its combat: there’s going to be a learning curve. How steep this curve ends up being will largely be up to you based on the difficulty you select, but part of it will be inherent to the game’s style. If the demo is anything like the final product, then it’s clear that RGG wants you to approach every engagement thoughtfully.

How you choose to fight and which enemies you prioritize is ultimately a choice you need to make, and that’s the beauty of Stranger Than Heaven. While your mind might have gone numb from countless pushover fights against grunts in past RGG games, each encounter in Stranger Than Heaven has the chance to be memorable and unique to you.

Despite the changes that longtime fans will have to make to adjust to this new combat style, Stranger Than Heaven promises to be another wonderfully weird, wild ride when it releases in January 2027.

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Posts By  Joshua Robertson