Heavy Rain Review for PS3

     Heavy Rain was one of those titles that was supposed to show what the PS3 was made of; To be able to purvey the systems ability to create real-life characters and show real emotions in a virtual world. Well that was in 2005 at the E3 show. It's 5 years later. What kinda game is it? Does it show off the hardware?

Gameplay

= I'm in the game! No, movie!... Wait... - Well there's really not much to say about the gameplay. Think of a game made up almost entirely of QTE's (Quick Time Events i.e. PRESS SQUARE! NOW TRIANGLE! Oooooh, too bad. You died.) and that's essentially Heavy Rain in a nutshell. It's just a glorified, interactive movie really. You perform actions dictated by on-screen motions. Let's go down a list of some of these motions:

Make eggs = Swirl right stick

Show FBI badge = Half right stick swirl

Put car into gear and apply gas = snap right stick down and press R2

So when you drive a car, you don't steer the car and gas, you simply do what tells you to carry the scene forward. That being said, there were some problems I ran into with the game's controls. 

     When you're in a fight, you're used to being prompted with certain presses to do on-screen actions. When your character pick up an object however, they don't want you to do what you're used to, they want you to move the sixaxis in the given direction. It was unnatural most of the came and really caught me off guard and it ruined my experience a bit. Sometimes you will need to hold the control stick in a certain position and swing the sixaxis. Given the resistance of the sticks and the shape of the controller combined with how hard you need to throttle the controller, it's very easy to move the stick out of placement and mess up what you're trying to do. In some sections where you need to look around and choose what you want your character to do, they don't make it clear what your character is supposed to do. Let's say I wanted to pick up something off of a table and I thought that the action appearing near it would have my character pick it up. Then imagine my character tossing the table instead of picking up an item. That doesn't literally happen in the game but that's kinda what you get at times when you think you're getting something else entirely. Overall, some of the controls are odd and the sixaxis motion controls can be very unreliable at times. And lastly, when you do have control over your character and moving them around their environments, it may actually make you miss the old tank controls of the old-school Resident Evil games.

     In summation, the gameplay boils down to performing contextual actions to drive the scenes of the game forward. They're not always clear, not always reliable, but most of the time they can feel very natural and satisfying. For implementing a control that's new in the universe of videogames, it isn't completely broken and it actually works really well so I think that's something really worth praise.

Story and Presentation

+ Whoo! Intense! - Whenever your character is in danger, you will feel the ever-daunting pressure of trying to survive a situation where you can die at literally any moment and that character's story will be over. It really adds quite a bit of intensity, more than gamers may be already used to. I fear for any casual gamers picking this one up heheh. Don't wet your pants! This may be the biggest draw of the entire game.

= Whodunit?! - Think of a basic detective movie and this is essentially that. It's definitely nothing that will blow you away and it's all cliched. Sometimes it's cool to be participating in a famous movie cliche but it does make for very predictable dialogue and actions. Don't really play the game for the story. 

= You have no moe- I mean emotion! - Sorry, No More Heroes has invaded my catchphrase encyclopedia. Now, it's not that the game necessarily has no emotion in it, it's just that it's lacking so much. Two games I'd like to use as examples are the Mass Effect series and Heavenly Sword.

     Mass Effect lends a lot of emotion into it's characters through unmatched voice-acting and well-written dialogue. Add that to the depth of it's characters and you're going to get a lot of emotions swirling around. It almost doesn't make sense how the character's are so believable when it comes to appearing real when a lot of their facial movements are so artificial and robotic but it works %100 of the time.

     Heavenly Sword was all about realistic emotion within their character's faces. It got so damn good at times that you could see the changes from anger to sadness to desperation in main character Nariko's face without her even uttering a word. You can just tell by the movements of her brow, cheeks, and lips. It was extreme to be able to sense that much from a virtual character.

     Now, Heavy Rain is a game that throws around the whole "I got emotion in friggin' SPADES, dude" thing and it just doesn't feel there most of the time. When it does, it seems it's mostly in part to how emotional the music can be at times. What's even weirder is that when they first showed the game off via a teaser trailer 5 years ago, the character they used, while still appearing rough, had vast amounts of emotion that we weren't used to seeing in games before. It's part of why everyone was acting like the PS3 was the most advanced system thus far. The current product barely has half of that emotion in the entire game. Why?

= The choice is yours... Kinda... - You are given the opportunity to make choices in the game for certain major and minor events. Some of them are moral, most aren't. The problem I had with it was that it felt like it didn't really matter what choice I made.  There are a lot of choices you can make that are huge game changers but it doesn't really strike you with a large impact unless you were to go through the game a second time. I suppose something else adding to the shallow feel is the narrow scope of the game compared to something like Mass Effect.

= JAY-sun! JAY-sun! - That line is all over the net. You can't talk about Heavy Rain without talking about that line and the awkward voice-acting. It's not that the acting was super terrible, it just lacked a lot of emotion and some of the actors' personal accents came through their New York accents which made it so awkward sometimes. Add in the unnatural repeated dialogue and the whole thing is more likely to feel weird long before it ever feels emotional.

- Back to reality - I have a very large problem when a game stresses realism running through it's veins when it seems to take every opportunity to kick you out of that realism. If you want to go for something realistic, it basically needs to be perfect. Things like npc's (Non-playable characters) moving straight through each other, screen tearing, a lack of facial expression, and awkward animations will really build a wall between your connection with what's going on. It was definitely the elephant in the room when it came to Heavy Rain, making it painful at times when you were taking it seriously.

Sound

+ The sound of the rain soothes - This is where Heavy Rain shines. Everything seems very carefully recorded. When you hear an object make a sound as it makes contact with something else, it feels very natural and real. Incredibly high quality sound when it comes to this game. The only thing I'd bicker about is how weak the volume of music felt when you were in a club or at a party and everyone (in the game) was talking about how loud the music was when you couldn't even hear an echo of the music within the places it was booming from. Perfect Dark Zero did clubs justice and Mass Effect followed suit. I wish Heavy Rain had done the same.

+ Music to my ears - The music is great! It's emotional, powerful, and exciting! It'd be worth grabbing the soundtrack for.

Graphics

= Par for the course - Heavy Rain looks like someone just went and made a game using Playstation Home as it's source code. It's impressive if you've never seen a PS3 game but I can think of many games that look prettier than this. If you bought the PS3 for graphics, this isn't the game you've been waiting for exactly... 

Should you buy?

     No matter what anyone's opinion is on Heavy Rain, if you even remotely consider yourself a gamer, I definitely encourage a rental. It's a different experience that should be, well, experienced. After playing it, you'll know if you want to buy it or not. Whatever you do, just don't pass it up. It's very hard to say what makes it intriguing or alluring but there is something to it's charm that's worth falling for.
     For me, the game was slightly a let-down. And, personally, I think it comes from Hubris. I believe I heard somewhere that David Cage, the writer and director of Heavy Rain, actually hates games when it comes to an entertainment medium. He doesn't believe they are capable of conveying what a movie can. He wanted to make a realistic, interactive, and emotionally heavy movie. Heavy Rain is certainly all of those but only in the most shallow respects. The realism was off and the emotion was definitely lacking. He seems to believe that he also created one of the first truly mature games ever with Heavy Rain. It leads me to think David Cage just wants attention and holds himself in very high regards when it comes to his place in the game industry. In the end, he comes away with a product that's just a bit higher than mediocre. Please, do give the game a try though.


Heavy Rain was developed by Quantic Dreams and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Played through the story with the entire cast alive and solving the crime, clocking in around 7-8 hours.