I probably swear in this. Just so you know.
Bafta winning, highly anticipated, genre breaking and movie/adventure game hybrid are four ways you can describe Heavy Rain, boring, annoying, inconsistent and cross dressing are another four. Heavy Rain is a definite ?marmite? affair and the only thing you need to remember before penetrating your PS3 with the disc is ?Didn?t we have interactive movie/games years ago, I can?t believe they broke down the genre boundary and spawned the massive multi million pound game/film hybrid genre we see today?. I can?t wait.
The brain child of Quantic Dreams Heavy Rain is a inter-medium movie/game with all the bad points of your most hated game and all the OK points of that run of the mill ?Hollywood Blockbuster? you just saw, rated 18 for cool factor points Heavy Rain completely comes down to personal taste, if you like sitting around for hours on end with your hands poised in the PS3 controller position not really doing much while the game you just bought trundles along then you?re going to love it, if however you switch it on and begin searching for the button to aim down the sights you?re in for a shocker. The murder mystery plot of Heavy Rain cannot be described as a straight up game, it can only be described as a loose hybrid of a movie and a game and I?m already incredibly insulting both of those formats. It?s definitely a new breed of genre I?ll give it that and it does make a lot of bold leaps in terms of new ways to immerse audiences it?s just a shame all those leaps are straight into well constructed brick walls which have been there since video game fundamentals began. If you?re into point and click games mixed with a plethora of annoying quicktime events with a loose connected Saw style rip off storyline but all with mind-blowing graphics get down to the shops now and while you?re there why don?t you pick up a copy of Pearl Harbour too you ?gamer!?
You play as one of four characters Ethan Mars a family man with a wife and two sons, Norman Jayden an FBI agent, Madison Paige a journalist and Scott Shelby a private detective investigating a series of murders. The game is told in chapters and skips between characters between each one. Graphically the game is amazing, I can?t stress this enough they are the best your console eyes will have ever laid their spongy retinas on. The loading screens in particular show what the PS3 is capable of, they depict a close up of the face one of several characters that make up the game in beautiful 1080p goodness to the point where it can seem a bit too real, the characters always look nervous and fidgety but thankfully never stare directly at the screen and into your room, you?d honestly feel violated if they did. The world is beautifully textured and brimming with colour yet unfortunately interactively pointless. Visuals is where the games excels but it?s good points end as Heavy Rain is unfortunately horrendously linear. You can?t go anywhere, try to explore and the game will simply force you back into the room you need to be in until you trigger the event that takes you to the next scene and so begins the many torrents of video game abuse the prison of Heavy Rain will throw at you, no matter how hard you try nothing you will never feel like you?re making a difference and you?re simply going through the motions. Each ?choice? you feel you get will barely change the story as the outcome will nearly always be the same and for a game that?s selling itself on being an interactive game where your actions determine the flow of the story, the words bull and shit come to mind. This is an on rails story with pre determined checkpoints, don?t get me wrong you can take a very minor detours in-between the checkpoints but it?ll be so minor it?s basically worthless I urge you to play the game with a sense of moral disillusion in order to have a good time, play it with the care free narcissistic attitude you would play Grand Theft Auto, don?t worry too much about the outcome, it?ll work out fine I promise. I?ll paint you a picture. In one instance a shop owner is held at gunpoint while you are in the store. Now you have a few options albeit they?re not spelled out so it comes down to which one you accidentally do first, however you can walk around and smack you would be assailant in the head, get caught by him and surrender or get caught, refuse his underwhelming demands and he shoots at you (and misses obviously) and the outcome will still be exactly the same. It?s the equivalent of driving along in your car and you get the choice of turning left, right or going straight ahead but no matter which one you choose you?ll realise you?re still in Sainsburys car park. A few instances in the game such as the choice to kill or save someone have slight impacts on the story but these are mere disposable characters and bare little difference to the plot. The killer will always be the same person and it?s a shame because I really wanted to break out my Poroit moustache and do some real crime scene investigating/blind accusing.
The gameplay in Heavy Rain has been sacrificed for the sake of story and visuals and the actual small gameplay elements are all quicktime events. Now this word will scare off nearly all seasoned gamers as quicktime events must be the most annoying excuse for game design ever created and the problem is they can only entertain you for so long and unfortunately for quicktime events you get no sense of accomplishment at the end, only a sense of ?thank all that is good and omnipotent that I don?t have to do that for another hour or two? but in Heavy Rain this is it, this is your game it?s not just a small addition this is the whole package, all other games with quicktime events are merely diluted compared this, Heavy Rain is double concentrate and by buying this you?ve just over indulged. Quicktime events are all you do, it?s the height of excitement, the pinnacle of pleasure, the extent of elation! You get the idea. The rest of the interaction involves you haphazardly tapping buttons and flicking the analogue to do mundane routine tasks like going to the toilet, picking up the ball, putting the ball down, sitting in the chair, getting up out of the chair, changing the channel on the TV. I tell no lies. Why did someone think this was good? At times you have to hold down every button on the pad to grab something on the screen like your wife?s shopping and if you accidentally let go he stops taking the bags off her and leaves her struggling, it creates some beautiful awkward sitcom moments which had me looking away from the screen at time in sheer embarrassment. If you wanted you could do this endlessly too. Thinking about it if I did ever play this game again I would only I?d do some voiceovers and have applause every time a new character walked in on the scene. In Heavy Rain you can?t lose as such the only way you can fail is through the quicktime events, sometimes you need to quickly hammer the button and sometimes you need to hold them down in a blink of an eye and in the heat of quicktime battle you?re almost definitely going to screw this up a few hundred times. The rest of the games ridiculous controls revolve around simple movement from area to area however Heavy Rain likes to think it?s all arty and pretentiously disgraces itself on this too. Simple walking around you?ll feel as though your character slides off some objects like they have a perfect convex invisible wall around them while you slump and inexplicably get stuck behind others. You?re in a hit and miss prison where the world around you is definitely out to ruin your day one way or the other. The R2 button is used to control forward walking which is the most illogical use of the PS3 controller I?ve heard of so far, the problem being you walk forwards with R2 and control the direction with the analogue. Seems straight forward but in practice its not and they say it?s a bad craftsman who blames his tools, well if you?re tools were a lump of butter, sandpaper and a bike pump and you?re trying to take a bulls temperature I think you?d be cussing whoever assigned you this crap too.
Highlights include the scenes with FBI agent Jayden as these are by far the most interesting as he has access to an augmented reality set of sunglasses where important clues can be found, analysed and pieced together. In fact his scenes are the only place you?ll find some decent game play, short that it is he provides you with the screens to check items that you have found and decipher your clues but only the ones you discover as him so some remembering work is in order to link this all together. Forget the fact the highly advanced technology he employs isn?t explained or in line with the rest of the games setting but this character is holding this very fragile game together! Another notable scene is the inevitable for this type of film noir piece is the sex scene. Prepare yourself for one of the best computer generated sex scenes you?ve ever laid your wasted youth life on, problem is strangely out of place and I can?t decide if I think it?s good or not I?d say this is on par with liking the sex scene in Avatar. There?s just something incoherently wrong about watching computer generated sex scenes, especially as I?m sweating in fear of another quicktime event to appear as for Ethans sake this is one moment I really don?t want to let the guy down on. I think it?s how ?arty? and delicate they handle the scene that bothers me as it looks like they really tried and I mean really, really tried to create a beautiful love making scenario. I?d much prefer to have done with it and have a full frontal polygonal porn scene with an incredibly complex quicktime event to go along with it. Unfortunately it doesn?t add anything to the storyline whatsoever and you can skip it altogether if you don?t make the right decisions, there was no build up it just happens on a whim I mean it wasn?t like there was some idle flirting in previous scenes where you tweaked the analogue stick to accidentally graze hands while walking or hold down 15 buttons so you could wink at her. If anyone walks in on you while you?re watching this (and you are watching this, you?re not pressing or playing anything) you?re going to feel as though you have some explaining to do.
Now I can imagine there will be some genuine uneducated proud fans with no sense of story telling willing to defend this game to the hilt but it has to be said that the storyline in this game is atrocious, Quantic Dream if you?re going to make a movie/game like this then you?d better do at least one of those right. We?ve already established this is not a game, or is barely a bad one depending on how you want to look at it. Either way the former needs to be rock solid and Quantic Dream drowned themselves in a phallic shaped landslide and jabbed Night Shyamalan twist juice through their eyes. Something like this should be tight, watertight. Heavy Rains story for the most part is good, some nice twists like a regular episode of Lost but just like a regular episode of Lost there?s a lot of BS involved stringing it all together, I struggle to understand just how this won a Bafta for best storyline and here?s two of may gaping plot holes that totally ruined all immersion in this game for me. Let me axplain.
HUGE MASSIVE OVERKILL SPOILERS AHEAD (Plus this will mean very little to you if you haven?t played it through)
Ethan has blackouts at the start of the game right? Does it explain that? Ever? No. He?s just turned mental schizophrenic 15 minutes into the game obviously. And why does he wake up with origami animals in his hand, in between all his kidnapping, trial building and killing does the killer follow him around 24 hours a day until he blacks out, whips out a sheet of A4 and shapes him up some beautifully crafted paper sculpture. Fuck off does he. Also it?s always raining, is the origami figure also laminated? Is that even possible? I?m nitpicking there I know but how about this, When Laura gets told the identity of the origami killer. Initially this pisses me off because I?m forcing my way through an ?interactive movie? however at the point I want to interact with it I fucking can?t and now the character knows more than I do! HOWEVER. When the credits rolled I got to thinking?.. this girl has never fucking met or knows Scott Shelby. There wasn?t one point in the game prior to this when they knew about one another. At least in the story I got. So what the fuck is she so shocked about, that name should mean fuck all to her. BULLSHIT. She should be more ?oooh a Scott Shelby you say, I should probably write that down? You can argue the name Shelby might loosely mean something to her yet in the next scene. How the fuck does she know where he lives? I mean come one do you think a film critic would stand for this shit? People in this interactive movie have psychic fucking powers. If you?re going to make a game like this you can?t just hash it out in a manner where most of the story ties are loose and barely make sense, it?s a classic example where they knew the start and end but didn?t know how to get from one to the other. I really don?t know how the game script writers keep their jobs, that Bafta was a fix, reptilian.
All in all it?s an alright game, literally ?alright? is the only verb worth giving out, borrow it from a friend or come and take my copy away. It?s a shame because it could have been so much better, in terms of a great story at least. I will give you one tip however. Think of it like this, before you play the game, decide that Ethan is a paranoid schizophrenic, the girl is psychic, Jayden is from the future and Shelbys mind is being electronically controlled by a pair of mischievous young boys and it may work out brilliantly. The game seems incomplete and a mess with no actually game in it to speak of, largely it?s a disappointing because Heavy Rain would be an amazing experience if it weren?t for the controls, characters and the forgettable storyline. Do you see what I?m saying?
Bafta winning, highly anticipated, genre breaking and movie/adventure game hybrid are four ways you can describe Heavy Rain, boring, annoying, inconsistent and cross dressing are another four. Heavy Rain is a definite ?marmite? affair and the only thing you need to remember before penetrating your PS3 with the disc is ?Didn?t we have interactive movie/games years ago, I can?t believe they broke down the genre boundary and spawned the massive multi million pound game/film hybrid genre we see today?. I can?t wait.
The brain child of Quantic Dreams Heavy Rain is a inter-medium movie/game with all the bad points of your most hated game and all the OK points of that run of the mill ?Hollywood Blockbuster? you just saw, rated 18 for cool factor points Heavy Rain completely comes down to personal taste, if you like sitting around for hours on end with your hands poised in the PS3 controller position not really doing much while the game you just bought trundles along then you?re going to love it, if however you switch it on and begin searching for the button to aim down the sights you?re in for a shocker. The murder mystery plot of Heavy Rain cannot be described as a straight up game, it can only be described as a loose hybrid of a movie and a game and I?m already incredibly insulting both of those formats. It?s definitely a new breed of genre I?ll give it that and it does make a lot of bold leaps in terms of new ways to immerse audiences it?s just a shame all those leaps are straight into well constructed brick walls which have been there since video game fundamentals began. If you?re into point and click games mixed with a plethora of annoying quicktime events with a loose connected Saw style rip off storyline but all with mind-blowing graphics get down to the shops now and while you?re there why don?t you pick up a copy of Pearl Harbour too you ?gamer!?
You play as one of four characters Ethan Mars a family man with a wife and two sons, Norman Jayden an FBI agent, Madison Paige a journalist and Scott Shelby a private detective investigating a series of murders. The game is told in chapters and skips between characters between each one. Graphically the game is amazing, I can?t stress this enough they are the best your console eyes will have ever laid their spongy retinas on. The loading screens in particular show what the PS3 is capable of, they depict a close up of the face one of several characters that make up the game in beautiful 1080p goodness to the point where it can seem a bit too real, the characters always look nervous and fidgety but thankfully never stare directly at the screen and into your room, you?d honestly feel violated if they did. The world is beautifully textured and brimming with colour yet unfortunately interactively pointless. Visuals is where the games excels but it?s good points end as Heavy Rain is unfortunately horrendously linear. You can?t go anywhere, try to explore and the game will simply force you back into the room you need to be in until you trigger the event that takes you to the next scene and so begins the many torrents of video game abuse the prison of Heavy Rain will throw at you, no matter how hard you try nothing you will never feel like you?re making a difference and you?re simply going through the motions. Each ?choice? you feel you get will barely change the story as the outcome will nearly always be the same and for a game that?s selling itself on being an interactive game where your actions determine the flow of the story, the words bull and shit come to mind. This is an on rails story with pre determined checkpoints, don?t get me wrong you can take a very minor detours in-between the checkpoints but it?ll be so minor it?s basically worthless I urge you to play the game with a sense of moral disillusion in order to have a good time, play it with the care free narcissistic attitude you would play Grand Theft Auto, don?t worry too much about the outcome, it?ll work out fine I promise. I?ll paint you a picture. In one instance a shop owner is held at gunpoint while you are in the store. Now you have a few options albeit they?re not spelled out so it comes down to which one you accidentally do first, however you can walk around and smack you would be assailant in the head, get caught by him and surrender or get caught, refuse his underwhelming demands and he shoots at you (and misses obviously) and the outcome will still be exactly the same. It?s the equivalent of driving along in your car and you get the choice of turning left, right or going straight ahead but no matter which one you choose you?ll realise you?re still in Sainsburys car park. A few instances in the game such as the choice to kill or save someone have slight impacts on the story but these are mere disposable characters and bare little difference to the plot. The killer will always be the same person and it?s a shame because I really wanted to break out my Poroit moustache and do some real crime scene investigating/blind accusing.
The gameplay in Heavy Rain has been sacrificed for the sake of story and visuals and the actual small gameplay elements are all quicktime events. Now this word will scare off nearly all seasoned gamers as quicktime events must be the most annoying excuse for game design ever created and the problem is they can only entertain you for so long and unfortunately for quicktime events you get no sense of accomplishment at the end, only a sense of ?thank all that is good and omnipotent that I don?t have to do that for another hour or two? but in Heavy Rain this is it, this is your game it?s not just a small addition this is the whole package, all other games with quicktime events are merely diluted compared this, Heavy Rain is double concentrate and by buying this you?ve just over indulged. Quicktime events are all you do, it?s the height of excitement, the pinnacle of pleasure, the extent of elation! You get the idea. The rest of the interaction involves you haphazardly tapping buttons and flicking the analogue to do mundane routine tasks like going to the toilet, picking up the ball, putting the ball down, sitting in the chair, getting up out of the chair, changing the channel on the TV. I tell no lies. Why did someone think this was good? At times you have to hold down every button on the pad to grab something on the screen like your wife?s shopping and if you accidentally let go he stops taking the bags off her and leaves her struggling, it creates some beautiful awkward sitcom moments which had me looking away from the screen at time in sheer embarrassment. If you wanted you could do this endlessly too. Thinking about it if I did ever play this game again I would only I?d do some voiceovers and have applause every time a new character walked in on the scene. In Heavy Rain you can?t lose as such the only way you can fail is through the quicktime events, sometimes you need to quickly hammer the button and sometimes you need to hold them down in a blink of an eye and in the heat of quicktime battle you?re almost definitely going to screw this up a few hundred times. The rest of the games ridiculous controls revolve around simple movement from area to area however Heavy Rain likes to think it?s all arty and pretentiously disgraces itself on this too. Simple walking around you?ll feel as though your character slides off some objects like they have a perfect convex invisible wall around them while you slump and inexplicably get stuck behind others. You?re in a hit and miss prison where the world around you is definitely out to ruin your day one way or the other. The R2 button is used to control forward walking which is the most illogical use of the PS3 controller I?ve heard of so far, the problem being you walk forwards with R2 and control the direction with the analogue. Seems straight forward but in practice its not and they say it?s a bad craftsman who blames his tools, well if you?re tools were a lump of butter, sandpaper and a bike pump and you?re trying to take a bulls temperature I think you?d be cussing whoever assigned you this crap too.
Highlights include the scenes with FBI agent Jayden as these are by far the most interesting as he has access to an augmented reality set of sunglasses where important clues can be found, analysed and pieced together. In fact his scenes are the only place you?ll find some decent game play, short that it is he provides you with the screens to check items that you have found and decipher your clues but only the ones you discover as him so some remembering work is in order to link this all together. Forget the fact the highly advanced technology he employs isn?t explained or in line with the rest of the games setting but this character is holding this very fragile game together! Another notable scene is the inevitable for this type of film noir piece is the sex scene. Prepare yourself for one of the best computer generated sex scenes you?ve ever laid your wasted youth life on, problem is strangely out of place and I can?t decide if I think it?s good or not I?d say this is on par with liking the sex scene in Avatar. There?s just something incoherently wrong about watching computer generated sex scenes, especially as I?m sweating in fear of another quicktime event to appear as for Ethans sake this is one moment I really don?t want to let the guy down on. I think it?s how ?arty? and delicate they handle the scene that bothers me as it looks like they really tried and I mean really, really tried to create a beautiful love making scenario. I?d much prefer to have done with it and have a full frontal polygonal porn scene with an incredibly complex quicktime event to go along with it. Unfortunately it doesn?t add anything to the storyline whatsoever and you can skip it altogether if you don?t make the right decisions, there was no build up it just happens on a whim I mean it wasn?t like there was some idle flirting in previous scenes where you tweaked the analogue stick to accidentally graze hands while walking or hold down 15 buttons so you could wink at her. If anyone walks in on you while you?re watching this (and you are watching this, you?re not pressing or playing anything) you?re going to feel as though you have some explaining to do.
Now I can imagine there will be some genuine uneducated proud fans with no sense of story telling willing to defend this game to the hilt but it has to be said that the storyline in this game is atrocious, Quantic Dream if you?re going to make a movie/game like this then you?d better do at least one of those right. We?ve already established this is not a game, or is barely a bad one depending on how you want to look at it. Either way the former needs to be rock solid and Quantic Dream drowned themselves in a phallic shaped landslide and jabbed Night Shyamalan twist juice through their eyes. Something like this should be tight, watertight. Heavy Rains story for the most part is good, some nice twists like a regular episode of Lost but just like a regular episode of Lost there?s a lot of BS involved stringing it all together, I struggle to understand just how this won a Bafta for best storyline and here?s two of may gaping plot holes that totally ruined all immersion in this game for me. Let me axplain.
HUGE MASSIVE OVERKILL SPOILERS AHEAD (Plus this will mean very little to you if you haven?t played it through)
Ethan has blackouts at the start of the game right? Does it explain that? Ever? No. He?s just turned mental schizophrenic 15 minutes into the game obviously. And why does he wake up with origami animals in his hand, in between all his kidnapping, trial building and killing does the killer follow him around 24 hours a day until he blacks out, whips out a sheet of A4 and shapes him up some beautifully crafted paper sculpture. Fuck off does he. Also it?s always raining, is the origami figure also laminated? Is that even possible? I?m nitpicking there I know but how about this, When Laura gets told the identity of the origami killer. Initially this pisses me off because I?m forcing my way through an ?interactive movie? however at the point I want to interact with it I fucking can?t and now the character knows more than I do! HOWEVER. When the credits rolled I got to thinking?.. this girl has never fucking met or knows Scott Shelby. There wasn?t one point in the game prior to this when they knew about one another. At least in the story I got. So what the fuck is she so shocked about, that name should mean fuck all to her. BULLSHIT. She should be more ?oooh a Scott Shelby you say, I should probably write that down? You can argue the name Shelby might loosely mean something to her yet in the next scene. How the fuck does she know where he lives? I mean come one do you think a film critic would stand for this shit? People in this interactive movie have psychic fucking powers. If you?re going to make a game like this you can?t just hash it out in a manner where most of the story ties are loose and barely make sense, it?s a classic example where they knew the start and end but didn?t know how to get from one to the other. I really don?t know how the game script writers keep their jobs, that Bafta was a fix, reptilian.
All in all it?s an alright game, literally ?alright? is the only verb worth giving out, borrow it from a friend or come and take my copy away. It?s a shame because it could have been so much better, in terms of a great story at least. I will give you one tip however. Think of it like this, before you play the game, decide that Ethan is a paranoid schizophrenic, the girl is psychic, Jayden is from the future and Shelbys mind is being electronically controlled by a pair of mischievous young boys and it may work out brilliantly. The game seems incomplete and a mess with no actually game in it to speak of, largely it?s a disappointing because Heavy Rain would be an amazing experience if it weren?t for the controls, characters and the forgettable storyline. Do you see what I?m saying?
