Heavy Rain Review

Ethan Mars: JJJAASSSSOONNN!!!!!

Heavy Rain is an awkward attempt at interactive story that blends both choice and emotion into gameplay. It's weird, clunky and has trouble telling an interesting narrative...for about half an hour. After that, Heavy Rain proves to be an amazing experience that lies somewhere between game and movie that is throughly engrossing and engaging.

Scott Shelby: Champion among men

The presentation of Heavy Rain is everything. You play as four characters each trying to find the Oragami Killer (as the press label him) for their own personal reasons. Ethan Mars is a father who's son is kidnapped by the killer, Norman Jayden is an FBI detective with a strange pair of glasses that act a lot like Batman's Detective mode, Scott Shelby is a private investigator who has been hired to find him and Madison Page is a sexy journalist...'nuff said. The motivations for the characters are truly astounding and Heavy Rain makes you do something you hardly do in video games: care about the characters. You want them to succeed, you want them to survive and most of all, you want this murderer to be brought to justice! The graphics are excellent, with technical prowess that would make you swear you were in the moment and excellent use of split screen, colours and other aspects. In short, it's a visual delight. Not to mention the sounds and the voice acting, and atmosphere...and everything else.

Madison Page: Never actually seen
doing journalist work...

Norman Jayden:
YYYEEEEOOOOOWWW!!!

Gameplay is vastly different from most mainstream games. The whole game is literally quick time events. This sounds boring, but it isn't. The real meat of Heavy Rain is in the story and characters. Making you perform easy quicktime events to perform actions such as closing a door or opening a cupboard may not be exciting, but they do emerge you within the world. Other times, quick time events are extremely successful in wrapping you into situations. Fights become dangerous as the game makes it entirely possible for you to die. In fact, you can kill each character in the story. The game has multiple endings to make sure what you do and how you react really matter in the grand scheme of things. These types of quick time events add stress and real danger to scenarios we would find amusing if Heavy Rain was a movie. The only other gameplay devices are walking and pressing the right button to initiate a choice/action. Walking is probably the hardest part of the game. You hold down a button to walk and then use the control stick to change direction. This sounds fine, but when the camera changes, this quickly becomes disorienting and frustrating. This aside, Heavy Rain feels real, almost like you could be in these character's shoes.

Heavy Rain might be shunned by gamers because of how different it is, but they're the ones missing out. Heavy Rain is incredible, and while not all games should be like this; it's great to have a game this special and different that it takes you completely by surprise and blows you away.