GameGuide

I had a second session on Heavy Rain last night, and I finally got into the storyline as such – not that my first session didn’t, it’s just that that was more of a setting the scene kind of thing. The worrying thing is I’m still not totally hooked on the game. This may be due to my high expectations and my memories of playing Fahrenheit, where you essentially get put right into the action, and from memory there wasn’t a heck of a lot of boring bits. This is in stark opposites to how Heavy Rain is going, where a lot of it seems to mirror my daily life; feeding the kids, home work, playing with the kids etc… I’m sure this is supposed to instill a certain amount of emotional attachment, but when my child goes missing in the game, it came as a relief. It meant that I might be able to get onto some of the grittier parts of the game. 

That’s not to say there hasn’t been any good stuff, playing the PI has by far been my favourite part of last night’s session, and the part that most made me reminisce about Fahrenheit. It was gritty and had some action.

Playing the part of the FBI dude however was a little long in the ear, but an essential part of what is essentially the hunt for a serial killer, and I guess realistic to what does go on in a crime scene – you know, walking around in a methodical grid looking for and then following clues.

I think there is still one more person that I get to play, then the game will probably switch from character to character depending on how the story progresses.

One thing that hit me last night was just how awesome the graphics are for the most part, with details such as individual pores in the skin on the faces of the characters – this admittedly in the cut scenes, but in a game that is carried by the quality of this cut scenes, this is a strong point. It would be easy to get lost in Heavy Rain, if it were not for a couple of things.

The first being the character animation. Now don’t get me wrong, Quantic Dream have done a great job, but there is just something not right with the way your character walks up and down stairs.

Another issue is the camera views, you only get two choices so it’s easy to get stuck in a corner not being bale to see anything – this is only a minor irritation, but it would have been nice to be bale to move the camera around whilst in free play mode.

The third issue is entirely from being a XBox gamer, and having played Fahrenheit on the XBox, the controls which are similar, have to be re-learnt to some degree, as rather than the XBox’s focus on coloured buttons, the PS3 focusses on symbols. So the dedicated PS3 player would have no trouble hitting the right key combinations, but for an XBox gamer like me, I keep having to look down. This however should remedy itself with time.

So while Heavy Rain hasn’t hooked me in as quickly as I would have liked, I’m going to stick with it because I’m sure than even though it’s taken me two nights to get this far, pretty soon things are going to pick up and I won’t be able to put the game down.

Read the full review here.