Wizzer's World

After many hours and many times of screaming “No, not that way!!” and “Damnit I DID hit X” I have finished playing through Heavy Rain, the thriller mystery exclusive for the Playstation 3. It took a little longer than I had originally planned due to some frustration with the control scheme and the ever impeding life thing I have going on (I really should do something about that).

Heavy Rain takes us through the story/mystery of the Origami Killer as if affects a family, the detectives searching, and the journalist reporting on it. Unlike some of the other games of this genre, you get to play as each different character to get their point of view on the story, and ultimately drive the story to a unique ending tailored to your actions. This is one of the story points that really makes Heavy Rain stand out. It’s a cleverly disguised “Choose Your Own Adventure” story where, depending on what choices you made, you may get a completely different ending than someone else. Because of the nature of the story, I hesitate to mention any plot line specifics for fear of spoiling it. Instead we will jump to the likes and dislikes.

Likes:
Great Story – Seems like most of the games I have really gotten into as of late have been driven by a good solid story. Heavy Rain really takes the murder mystery story to a whole new level with the different ways you can drive it, including multiple different outcomes. I have said many times that story is really key to a good game so I won’t spend time on this one. The story was good.
Detailed Graphics – The detail that goes into the characters and settings in Heavy Rain is amazing (in some places). If you get the chance I highly suggest checking out some of the bonus videos on the disk that show the actors that portrayed the characters in the game. The fact that they were able to make the in game faces match so perfectly was astounding.
Innovative control scheme – Heavy Rain really takes immerse control to the extreme where you can interact with so many things and each action is meticulous in it’s implementation. The use of the Six Axis to perform tasks like sliding a door, opening a cupboard, or turning a nob worked really well…..for the first 10 min (Continued Bellow).
Multiple perspectives – As the story played out you get to jump from Ethan (The Father), to Madison (The Journalist), to Norman (The Agent), and to Scott (The P.I.). Because of this it almost felt like you were following four different stories, but they all tied together in an amazing way and it was genius to see the same story from all of the different views.
Solid voice acting – None of the voice acting really felt forced like we have seen in other games. Most of the conversation seems to flow naturally and fit the mood of the game very well. The behind the scenes videos showing how they auditioned some of the actors was a great touch. I love watching voice actors perform.

Dislikes:
Suspension of Disbelief – This stemmed from one of the first scenes in the game, hopefully not much of a spoiler, where Ethan looses track of his son in a mall. He can see him only about 30 feet in front of him but the mall is crowded and it’s hard to catch up, even though you are calling out to your son, he blatantly ignores you for the full 20 min you are chasing him (right behind him BTW). The people in the mall actually move in front of you so it makes it even more difficult to catch up. Also, you can’t run so you are doing this at a walking pace. There were quite a few times in the game where I felt that the “fourth wall” was broken due to something completely unbelievable.
Graphic Glitches – So as nice and detailed as the graphics were, there were still quite a few graphics glitches that really took it from a simple glitch to a full blown annoyance. Things like fabric, the clothes they would put on or take off looked horrible. Like they could stand up on their own. Walking around the rooms made your character look like a strung out marionette. It just seemed that in free walk mode the characters had no fluid motion.
Innovative control scheme – So after the first 10 minutes the control scheme starts to really be tedius and aggravating. For example, at one point I needed to walk over to the fridge, tap the analog stick to the left to open the fridge door, tap up to grab the orange juice, shake the controller to shake the juice, tap up again to drink the juice, tap down to put the juice back and tap right to close the fridge. Now count that. That’s 6 button/stick commands to do a simple act of drinking juice. Between each command there is a pause in gameplay so I can issue the next command. Towards the end of the game it wasn’t quite as bad since you aren’t really searching anymore.

For the most part, I didn’t hate the game. The story kept me going and the way the game played out for me was good for how I played it. I really wish that the dislikes didn’t detract from the game as much as they did because it would have made it that much better. As it was I feel like I spent 20 minutes of every hour playing just doing the control gimmicks and tedious button mashing. Overall I enjoyed playing it and would give it a Solid 7 Origami Cranes out of 10.