Review: Heavy Rain

Rating:

Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: Interactive Drama
Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

A lot has been said about this game. Many people doubted a concept like this could even work, and that might be true, depending on who’s playing the game. One thing is true: Heavy Rain is not for everyone, and that’s because this is not a conventional game. If you're looking for a shooter, killing people, explosions, something you can find on a Call of Duty, Killzone 2 or Uncharted 2, or online multiplayer modes, then Heavy Rain is not for you.

This is something different. It's actually so different that it's hard to define its genre and even if you can simply call this a videogame.

No other game has been so close to a film then this one, but on the other hand this is still a videogame: you have a mission, you can die, you have choices to make and different paths to take, some of which will change the game’s direction.

Without spoiling many details on this game's plot, I’ll just say that it’s centered on a serial killer called the Origami Killer. He kidnaps children, drowning them in rain water 5 days later.

The last kidnapped child was Shawn Mars, son of Ethan Mars. You'll need to control four different characters, all with the same goal: stop the Origami Killer, and find Shawn Mars.

You control Ethan Mars, the father of the last missing kid, Madison Paige, a photojournalist, Norman Jayden, an FBI agent and Scott Shelby, a retired police officer, currently working as a private investigator.

The game starts really slow, since you have to learn the control scheme, which is really different than anything you've seen, and at the same time it's one of this game's biggest complains. If you walk, instead of using only the left analog stick, you'll have to press the R2 button too. It’s hard to figure out why this happens, since you don't really need the left analog stick for anything besides walking. When you're in certain areas it can be tough to control a character the way you want, and you end up doing things you don't really want to, like walking in wrong directions. After a while into the game you get used to it, but still it's hard to think they couldn't come up with something more friendly.

Since we are talking about game play, it's worth noting that if you feared this to be a collection of QTE's (quick time events) like you find in a God Of War game or the latest Resident Evil games, then you couldn't be more wrong.

First of all, it has to be said that until now, in every game with QTE's, if you miss one button, you will see a "Game Over" screen and you need to start everything all over again. In Heavy Rain, that doesn't happen. If you miss a couple of buttons, or even all of them, the game doesn't stop. You can even kill some characters...even all four playable characters, and you won't see a single "Game Over" screen, but that's exactly this game's goal: your actions will determine the course of this game's story. One wrong decision, one button badly pressed and you might find yourself in really complicated situations. And you will have to pay for those decisions sooner or later and that's why this game works so well. It's also why some people might not like it. But that's what happens when you do something different like this; it will always divide the public opinion. There are also a lot of fight scenes and action sequences that take the QTE’s to a whole new level. It’s done in such a great way that you’ll actually want to repeat them later. You actually feel like you’re fighting someone. That’s something that you don’t usually say when you do a QTE. It’s always everything so scripted, but not in Heavy Rain.

This game has so many possibilities that more than twenty different endings can happen. The one I’ve seen made complete sense, and this leads us to another important quality of this game: replay value.

The best part of this game is to see the different possibilities, twists and endings the game has, and you'll find yourself playing this game more than once or twice I am sure. Expect around 8 hours of game play if everything goes well.

There are fight scenes you might not experience in one play through, you can choose between killing one character or spare his life. But be careful. Pulling the trigger might change the story more than you think. One the other hand, if you let that person live, things might also go wrong. Think twice before every decision you take.

The game is not too hard even at the highest difficulty setting. You can choose between three difficulty settings. Playing on the hardest one, makes the QTE sequences harder, and it’s easier to make mistakes, but even there, it’s not something really hard, although sometimes you do have to press five buttons at the same time, and you end up playing twister with your fingers.

About the saving system, you have a lot of checkpoints throughout the entire game, so if you quit your game, you will come back to the last one you reached. You can also go back in the game through the chapter selection on the main menu, since the game is divided in chapters.

But what's a great game play without a great plot? Even with some problems while controlling characters you will not want to stop playing until you know who the Origami Killer is. If only every Hollywood film would have a plot with the same quality like this game has...

That's another strong point of Heavy Rain. It's hard to find a videogame with a strong and mature plot like this one has. When I say mature I’m also talking about something else that caused controversy: strong language and nudity.

Every day we find films with nudity, violence, guns and blood. But every time a game comes out with only some partial nude scenes or sex scenes (no frontal nudity) it always sparkles a lot of controversy, some countries even ban those games. Heavy Rain is no exception. And after playing it, it's hard to understand how so little can be considered so wrong. This is not supposed to be played by kids. Those nude scenes are there, both male and female nude scenes. If that leaves you uncomfortable, then it might be better to tell you now that at one point or another some boobs and/or asses might show up on-screen.

Now onto the second controversial topic: the use of strong language during the game. You'll find the "f" word (among others) many times during your play through, but none of these things are there just to be controversial. It's more about being realistic then controversial, and since this game is based (or at least tries to be based) on real life, it makes sense to include all of this. It's good to see that from times to times, game producers don't really care about these controversies and do what they intended to do without censuring anything.

Speaking about language, you can choose many different languages for this game since it was dubbed in lots of them. You can also change the language for the subtitles (which sometimes are out of synch) and menus of the game, and that leads us to another weak point of the game. For a game supposed to be located in North America, it's hard to sound believable when many of these actors hardly sound American. It's like English is their second language, which is understandable since this game was produced in France by a French producers and some French actors. But maybe if they hired American actors the final result would've been much better.

Graphically this game can either be a beast, or weak. The loading screens are great. You can see the character you're about to control in a close-up, and they always look amazingly detailed, just like during the game. But unfortunately that's only for the four stars of the game. The secondary characters sometimes look bad and the extras even worst. You can always notice a lack of detail between the main characters and the extras in every videogame, but this game makes it look scary at times, especially when they are face to face. Facial animations could’ve been better, even for the main characters.

When you're inside houses or small sets, the game flows nicely. That changes when you're in huge places like streets, discos or malls. There's screen tearing all over the place and some occasional frame drops, which is a shame since the game looks so good overall. Heavy Rain looked promising to surpass Uncharted 2 as (arguably) the best looking game on PS3. But it didn’t get there. The level of graphical polish you find on Uncharted 2 is no match for Heavy Rain. Still, it has good graphics, but after all the hype, it’s hard not to be slightly disappointed.

Something this game has is a great environment. The game starts happy and full of colors, but then when the kidnapping happens and it starts to rain the game achieves a certain depressing level that works really well until the end. And speaking about the rain, it looks really good. The music also helps a lot to achieve this kind of environment.

The score is another one of this game’s strong points and it sounds like it could be from a Hollywood blockbuster. Sometimes there are some bugs that might stop a song suddenly, but it’s a small complain in the audio department that hardly bothers your gaming experience.

About gaming modes, you can find only the typical single player offline mode. Like you’d expect, there’s no multiplayer online modes or death matches. Only the possibility of downloading the four extra episodes, to be available at a latter date.

On a side note, if you bought the special edition, you can find a voucher with a code, so you can download the soundtrack, along with a dynamic theme (which looks great on your PS3 by the way) and the first of four chapters of download content that are scheduled to be released. All of this inside the PSN Store. Each one of these four chapters includes one of the playable characters from the main game, and the one included in this special edition is Madison Paige. This level can be only 10 minutes long, it’s set before the Heavy Rain game, and tells us anything we didn’t already knew about her. If you had doubts about this being worth your money, I don’t think it is, at least this one. It seems like a poor excuse for a download content that has to be paid. When you finish the level a screen comes out telling you how many different endings you can have to those 10 minutes…and you can try them all, but still looks lame and a bad excuse for a DLC level.

Overall if you’re looking at a different experience, a new concept in video gaming where your decisions change the course of the game’s plot, good graphics, a story that will grab your attention until it ends (and I doubt you will play it only once), a great soundtrack, nice replay value, then this is for you.
It’s nice to play something different sometimes, and this game is a great experience, and it’s worth every penny you spend on it, and it’s hard to not be curious about what Quantic Dream are going to do next. They have come a long way since Fahrenheit, and whatever it is, it will be worth the wait.

Graphics: The main characters looks great, the sets look detailed overall. Expect some occasional bugs, screen tearing and frame drops though. 8/10

Sound: Great soundtrack. The voice actors could’ve been American. Sometimes voices are a bit out of synch. 8.5/10

Gameplay: The character controls can be hard to learn at the beginning, but after a while you will get used to them. The QTE’s are perfect the way they are. The action scenes are great to play. 9.2/10

Presentation: The story is one of the best you can find in a videogame. Believable dialogs (excluding some clichéd lines) and great environments. 9.1/10

Replay-value: One play through won’t be enough to do everything (especially if you like collecting trophies). You will find many reasons to start the game again and try different choices. 9/10

OVERALL: 9.2/10