Review: Heavy Rain – peespee63

Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Rarely does a game come along which grabs the attention of so many within the industry and shake it to its very core.  Heavy Rain is one such title.

An adult film noir in the form of an interactive game, creating the new Game Noir genre (you heard it here first). OK, Game Noir isn’t new: it’s just it’s becoming very very popular.

Normally, you get either a fanastic game, or a fantastic story contained on your digital medium, but this is one of the very few exceptions to this rule. An intelligent, organic and morphic story which changes depending on ALL of your decisions, multiple endings, stunning visuals, real emotion, fabulous acting, a world class script worthy of the annals of the finest films and books, a shocking yet strangely familiar twist, proper heart-palpatation-inducing action, a uniquely intuitive yet essentially simple control scheme and four emotive main characters with everything to gain, and lose.

Heavy Rain has set a benchmark for story-driven gaming, and let me tell you, it’s a pretty high bar, and I suspect it will be a long time before any other game comes close to touching it.  The Uncharted series is known for having fantastic stories and characters as well as mind-blowing gameplay, as too the Final Fantasy series, but the focus with HR is on the experience of the story through the action, rather than interspersing the action with cutscenes for posterity and exposition or narration.  To put it plainly, the whole game is a series of interactive cutscenes telling a thriller story.

The morphic story means that a certain action by a certain character changes the whole experience.  A character being killed will not end the story, but rather keep it going.  If all of your characters die, the story concludes properly, instead of you getting a “Game Over, please try again”.  Similarly, you are rewarded with better endings if you complete major tasks properly (i.e. fully, with no mistakes, seeing as there is no “proper” way of playing the game).

As your actions directly affect the game, it can sometimes be a harrowing experience when you do an action that causes pain and suffering, or if you are ultimately helpless to do anything, and you may find yourself feeling similar emotions and feelings to your avatar, though potentially greatly dulled (unless you decide to [SPOILER] yourself, but that’s just nuts, you sick freak)

The characters themselves are quite varied: you have Ethan Mars, the doting, yet physically and psychologically damaged parent, Norman Jayden (though you can call him “Nahman” if you like), the green FBI field agent assigned to help the police with the Origami Killer case, Madison Paige, the sexy and caring journalist filling in the “BOOBS!” category of the cast, and Scott Shelby, the tough Private Detective performing his own investigation into the Origami Killer case.  The mo-cap and voice acting was all done by the real actors, perhaps most famously by Jacqui Ainsley, the British model portraying Madison, and the cast seems to be international or mostly European-based (particularly France), but the story is told in America, so you do get a slightly weird thing when certain characters talk with an American accent, with inflections of French.

The soundtrack is a pretty good orchestral suite, following a dark and sinister undercurrent, which helps to express the feel of the game as a whole.  At times it can actually be quite emotional, tying in with the action on screen.  Sound effects are realistic and occur properly

I’ve heard of much negativity regarding the game, focusing on the minor flaws and blowing them out of proporion.  Yes, the graphics are not the best I’ve ever seen (seems to emphasise the brown a little too much), the charcter’s dialogue can be a bit irksome or out-of-place at some points, and certain actions or movements feel alien and not fluid enough, especially when performing tedious actions that we in real life would stream together effortlessly: even opening a fridge takes a bit of work.

Obviously people will have a problem with the different control system, we’re all used to just moving the left analogue stick to move, but now we’re expected to press R2 to walk?  Yeah, get over it, don’t complain about the control system or the nature of it; It’s supposed to help simulate human movement and the awkwardness of certain actions, and the Quick-Time-Event nature surprisingly works incredibly well, because they’re not mindless button-mashing combo-fests, but rather clever and occasionally awkward hand-acrobatics, involving combinations which you could map to parts of the body in certain situations.

But do not judge it as poor because it’s different, rather, you should go for it all guns blazing, throw yourself in at the deep end and experience something new and different.

There are also some issues with graphical pop-in, and I’ve heard reports of the game freezing up altogether, but the speculation whether this is to do with the 1.01 patch is just speculation, as it hasn’t been specifically proven that either the 1.00 or 1.01 causes  these issues.  By any means, the game isn’t broken and like many titles there are plenty of bugs, but they can be overlooked  On the plus-side, the graphics are some of the best you will see on the PS3, and the good thing is that they are all generated in-engine, there’s no FMVs with ridonkulously awesome CG graphics (that’s right, I said ridonkulously, what of it, Word-Nazis?) to juxtapose the in-game stuff.

I strongly believe it to be one of the contenders for, if not The Game Of The Year and would be very disappointed if it were not to pick up at least some awards for the amazing technical achievement.  It also opens up the gaming world to mature non-gamers (not mature as in elderly, but as in grown-up) as it’s not a hardcore in-your-face frag-fest and it’s not mindless twaddle, but an experience which would be worthy of high-class cinema or books.

This year’s first must have PS3 title, and boy, is it a cracker.  It’s nowhere near perfect, there is some issue with the graphics and objects, and movement can be a bit frustrating sometimes, but it’s probably the first must-have exclusive on the PS3 this year.  Hopefully, it will broaden both Gamer’s and non-Gamer’s horizons, as it surely has a lot of appeal for film and literary buffs, and the hardcore gamers can maybe learn something about humanity at it’s most desperate and tenacious.