Heavy Rain Review

8.0

Review Score:

I’ve been playing Heavy Rain since it was released a number of weeks ago and I was sceptical of how the demo played and whether I would enjoy the full game or not.  I took a HUGE gamble and bought it immediately.  After the lengthy install and updates I set in motion starting the story.

Upon playing through the ‘Prologue‘ you are introduced to one of the story’s main characters called Ethan Mars, who is a family man who has two children and a wife. You go through the tutorials like learning how to shave and putting clothes on and what button or six-axis direction you need to do with some ease(worth noting that difficulty has a major impact on response time.) What transpires next is a family trip to the Mall where Jason goes missing and as Ethan you have to go looking for him and you see the end result at the end of the chapter.

I’m not going to spoil the story in this review but that’s the prologue and make of the story as you will.

There are four main characters that have a crossover throughout the game and you are led to believe certain things that make the game so enjoyable that Heavy Rain grips you so tight that will make you not put your controller down until you finish the game. Scott Shelby, Madison Paige, Norman Jayden and Ethan Mars are all characters that you will have your own opinion of all the way through the game until it reaches its big climax towards the end of the game.

What Quantic Dream have managed to do with this game is make you the gamer the major role in deciding a person’s fate and how (in detail) they meet that fate making you feel emotions as if you were one of the characters in the story. I haven’t felt this engrossed in a game since Mass Effect. Quantic Dream uses the latest face capture technology and the characters who do the voices for the game look 99.9% like the characters with the exception of Madison Paige who only has the facial features and not the hair but aside from that all the emotions the you see from the characters are fantastically done and this is another prime example of how the game sucks you in keeps you wanting to play more

As for the sounds and music from the game, to me it is not as strong for me as you only hear the main music when something bad is about to happen and that’s a lot of the time it has to be said and it could have done with a bit more variety of emotive music but aside from that the rest of the music is fine and the sounds and voiceovers from the actors work perfectly well.

One major gripe some reviewers have had with this game is the control system and I too was a bit unsure of the controls at first but the more you practise the better and easier it becomes. It is worth noting that the difficulty does have a major impact on reaction times and it does depend on how realistic you want Heavy Rain to be. Myself personally I played this game on Easy as I did find it difficult to get through the many fight sequences thought the course of the game. There are several different actions that the six-axis controller is able to do.  One is shaking the controller and from keeping the pad level to thrusting it forward and back. As for the button pressing you do one of these things, mashing the button as fast as you can, just pressing the button or holding it down.

In terms of gameplay i found Heavy Rain a slow starter but as I got through the opening chapters and worked my way through the main story I couldn’t let the controller down and played it through 8 hours in one day just to see who the Origami killer is. You are cleverly made to believe the killer is one person and for it in a heartbeat change to someone that i had never even thought of and that was a genius touch by the games creators.

There are several problems however with Heavy Rain’s gameplay. One being that Quantic Dream say that no two gameplays are really the same yet after playing through the game to a certain point then really that statement only applies after “On the Loose” scenario and then it gets a bit boring on a second play through from the beginning. Does not having a shave REALLY have an impact on your story? I haven’t found a game play through that it has made a difference to, some of the little actions are pointless I find sometimes and Quantic Dream ought to have added a bit more variety in terms of story defining decisions.

I also thought that there are conversations that were repetitive and the game did not have a clear direction in what you have to do to progress within the chapters, you could press the thought button but even then that does not help sometimes.

I got the impression that the characters accents were not crisp and even though the characters were from the same city/state they all had a different local accent and that’s what Quantic Dream ought to have researched a bit more.

Overall i enjoyed this game as it got me gripped from near enough the beginning of the game through to the very end and although it’s going to be hard to justify a second play through it is still worth the £40 in the shops

NXT Score: 8/10

Pros

• Great Story
• Unique
• Great Graphics
• Controls are EXTREMELY responsive

Cons

• A second play through though is a bit bland and boring
• Some Trophy Glitches
• Conversations too repetitive
• No clear progression route