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Product Features

Genre
Other
Publisher
Sony
Release Date
February 26, 2010
Available Platforms
PlayStation 3, PlayStation 3

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Heavy Rain

Experience a gripping psychological crime thriller filled with innumerable twists and turns, where even the smallest actions and choices can cause dramatic consequences. The hunt is on for the Origami Killer, named after his calling card of leaving folded paper shapes on victims. Four characters, each with their own motives, take part in a desperate attempt to stop the killer from claiming a new victim. Heavy Rain is an interactive, single player, action adventure game in which every decision players make influences the evolution of a desperate quest to catch a deadly killer poised to strike again. Featuring a complex and dark storyline meant for mature audiences, the game is a PlayStation 3 exclusive featuring a variety of possible endings, advanced crime scene analysis, replayable chapters,...

  • Ross McIndoe June 02, 2010 PS3
    ****

    Heavy Rain is a game that largely tests the player's ability to make decisions - the fact that I've decided to try and review it tells you why I was something of a failure on my first play through. The problem is that Heavy Rain isn't really a game as much as it is a "Choose Your Own Story" novel in videogame form.
    It does bare some similarity to the traditional point & click adventure as players walk around rooms attempting to find objects they can interact with to solve the puzzle and the action scenes use Quick Time Events that are reminiscent of games like God of War. It also offers conversation trees in the mould of Mass Effect that allow players to decide exactly how to interact with other characters with the wrong choices often having severe consequences. (Top tip: If the dude has a gun - be nice)
    All of these comparisons with other games show what makes Heavy Rain good but not especially original so what really sets Heavy Rain apart, making it both hugely enjoyable and a pain to review is its focus on storytelling over Gameplay.
    The story itself is centres around a serial killer known as "The Origami Killer" a mysterious villain that has been kidnapping young boys and drowning them in rainwater. The player then watches the mystery unravel through the eyes of a journalist, an FBI agent, a private detective and the father of the latest victim, all of whom are desperately trying to find the boy before it's too late. By and large, the dialogue between these characters and the handful of more minor ones that support them is pretty good, far better than the B-Movie scripts most games offer up however the voice-acting often leaves a lot to be desired. The reason for this is very simple - Quantic Dream are a French developer and decide to use an all-French cast, which is either admirably patriotic or a piece of unfortunate penny-pinching. Either way, the result is that the characters often betray their American accents by getting the emphasis on words completely wrong and generally sounding like English isn't there first language. This is never a massive issue but can be distracting.
    To tell anymore of the story would completely ruin the game for all those who've yet to play it but suffice to say its engrossing enough to keep you playing for the whole game, which brings us to the games first big flaw - length. How long Heavy Rain lasts can actually vary by almost an hour depending on how you play (read: A lot less happens if everyone dies in the first few chapters) but even at its longest it only about 8 hours long which isn't exactly value for money if you paid £40 for it. (Although if you did that you probably don't use this site and so probably won't read this...) This is remedied to some extent by the way in which the story can be drastically altered by the decisions you make, giving incentive to play through the game more than once. However, most decisions have little impact on the final outcome and the more you replay chapters, the more you realise that despite the illusion of choice, Heavy Rain is still a game and so it can only grant the player so much control over how the story plays out which comes as a bit of a disappointment albeit an understandable one.
    The only other flaw worth mentioning is that the button prompts on screen are sometimes hard to read as a product of Quantic Dream's attempts to prevent them from looking garish and ruining the suspension of disbelief. Similarly it can be difficult to determine what exactly your next button press will do when the screen is full of arrows showing the various moves you can make. This is frustrating as you are punished not for poor decision making but because you aren't sure what decision you're making.
    These are only minor flaws in what is one of the most important titles ever in advancing games as a storytelling medium and as a credible form of media. At times it offers more tension than any film could hope to through it interactive element and the story has so many ingenious twists that you'll struggle to put the controller down from start to finish.