Quantic Dream has always been about raising the bar in their video games. With the engaging story of their previous title, Indigo Prophecy, it made players actually think for once about what their actions might do to the future of the game world. Heavy Rain is no different and, right from the beginning, really throws your mind for a loop.

STORY
If you are a regular reader of our fine website, then you know that the most important thing to me as a video gamer is an engaging story. When Heavy Rain was announced I followed its progress like a hungry dog ,waiting to feed on what was promised. After having playing through the entire game, Heavy Rain is easily one of the most epic, story-driven games I have ever played. In no other game have I felt as engaged as I did when playing this game.

While I wont go into any of the story details I will tell you that you start the game out as Ethan Mars. Ethan Mars is your typical dad thrown into the fire by a series of very unfortunate events. These events lead you on a quest to find out who the elusive ‘Origami Killer’ is. The tutorial level starts out as Ethan is waking up to what seems to be any other day. You learn how to control the game by doing every day activities such as brushing your teeth or playing with your kids. This is also where you learn that the decisions you make in Heavy Rain are permanent and can alter the way the game shapes itself. Feel like watching TV instead of doing Ethan’s work? Guess you will just have to see where that leads you…

As you move through the Heavy Rain story, you branch off to play several different characters. Each character has his or her own part to the story and they all end up weaving together in their fight against the Origami Killer. There were many occasions while playing through Heavy Rain when I felt like I was playing the movie Seven. At points in the game I felt regret for some of the decisions that I made and some of the gameplay moments triggered emotion in not only myself, but also people that watched me play through. I live with a few people who are not gamers and they, for the first time, actually wanted to sit and watch me play a game. Any dev team looking to create a game with a heavily story-driven element needs to take notes from the Quantic Dream folks. One final note on the story: I want to make it known that I only played through the game once. Sure, I could have gone back to change my decisions but I felt that it would really mess with the experience. Heavy Rain is a game best played once and then passed off for someone else to experience.

GAMEPLAY
The gameplay in Heavy Rain is very much a ‘Choose your Own Adventure’ type game. While you do use the R2 button to walk your character around the main actions are done by stick motions or button pressing in quicktime event-fashion. Let’s say that your character’s hands are tied and you need to break a piece of glass to cut through a rope. An action sequence will pop up and if you don’t hit the buttons in time it will either start you over or change the way the scene plays out. The speed in which you move a control can affect things as well. Moving a direction too fast can cause you to negatively affect certain situations that you are in.

I found that the quicktime event controls in Heavy Rain were implemented well and easy to use. The one negative about the controls would be that the movement control is plain clunky at times. There were some weird cases where I attempted to walk one direction but my on screen character decided he wanted to spin in circles. The great thing about the controls in Heavy Rain is that even if you are not a hardcore gamer you can still really enjoy this game.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Heavy Rain really shows off the power of the PlayStation 3 graphics engine. While the graphics look somewhat different from the early screens which were released for the game, everything really is a pleasure to look at. The character animations really show how emotion can be displayed in a video game. There were times in the game that you could feel what kind of pain a character was going through just by looking at their expressions. The same can be said for the environments in Heavy Rain – there is not a moment that goes by that you do not feel that something is going wrong in this city. As the story progresses you can see that people look unsettled and on-edge by the events going on and the environment seems to adapt to that.

The sound in Heavy Rain has to be the one real lowpoint in the entire game. The voice acting in some cases is just down-right horrific. When you are trying to build a game around and engaging story, it is almost a necessity that the character voices match to who they are. Some of the voices just seemed like they were trying too hard to come across as an American accent. There was a point in the story where some of the kids voices sounded like they were being forced through an auto-tune. Hopefully for Quantic Dream’s next game they focus a bit more time in the voice acting department and hire some actors actually from where the story is meant to take place.

While playing Heavy rain I did not encounter any graphical anomolies, however I did come across several voice issues. There were points in the game where the speech simply did not match what was being said by the characters on screen. This happened enough in the game to be noticeable – lyp synching, anyone?

FINAL THOUGHTS
Heavy Rain is the blockbuster that the PlayStation 3 desperately needed. It is an engaging story to play through and really makes you feel like you were there along side those people hunting the Origami Killer. Voice acting issues aside, Heavy Rain is a must-buy for any PS3 gamer looking to add to their collection. Heavy Rain is not only a fantastic game but it has added itself to my top 10 games of all time. This is one you do not want to miss.