Heavy Rain UK Review

If you're planning on skipping the bulk of this text and heading straight to the review score to decide whether or not you should play through Heavy Rain, just know this: the game starts slow. It'll take you a couple hours to get into the meat of the experience and for things to really pick up, but once it does, you'll be on the edge of your seat until the end and you won't want to put the controller down. In other words, if you stick with it, Heavy Rain will give you a ride like you rarely see in games.

Having said that, it's also worth quickly pointing out that I'm going to keep this review completely spoiler-free, so feel free to read it without fear of anything being ruined for you (and trust me, you don't want anything ruined).

Quantic Dream's last title, dubbed Indigo Prophecy in North America and Fahrenheit pretty much everywhere else, tried to bridge together intricate storytelling with gameplay by using what were essentially quick-time events (think Dragon's Lair). A button prompt appears on the screen, and if you press it in time, the game continues and you get another one. If you don't, you fail and usually wind up staring at the words "Game Over".

Click the image to watch our video review.With Heavy Rain, the studio took this control mechanic to a completely different level by removing the win/fail result and instead turned it into what can best be described as a branching narrative. You can't ever actually fail in Heavy Rain. There is no Game Over screen, and nothing will force you to have to replay anything. No matter what you do, the game, its characters and the story move on.

This has multiple effects. If you're in an action sequence, missing one prompt might not mean much other than that the fight or chase would play out a little differently. Rather than taking out the bad guy right then, you might get knocked down but get another chance right after that. Miss too many and the bad guy might get away, but like I said, the story will continue on, no matter the result. In other instances, these options (as there is often more than one button available to you at any one time) will decide what a character says, how they react to something, what you interact with or so on and so forth.

The result is that although you're still matching button prompts, Heavy Rain feels much more like you're choosing and influencing what happens in the game, rather than simply reacting to it. This is a major and key element of the control mechanics that separates Heavy Rain from the likes of Indigo Prophecy, Dragon's Lair or even God of War's boss takedown sequences, and it's really what makes the actual gameplay work quite well.

What's really interesting is that Heavy Rain manages to always keep you on your toes, and if you don't pay attention and keep your cool, you'll pay for it. There are action sequences that happen when you least expect them, and if you're not ready, you may "fail" them. In other cases, the opposite is true: events can happen very quickly and your gut instinct may be to react to them, when the best option may have been to wait for a better opportunity (or not react at all). The first time this last bit happened to me, I had to stop playing for a minute and think about what I'd done and what the consequences would wind up being. Things can get pretty intense, to say the least.

The beginning is slow, but important.The great thing about all of this, and the reason that Heavy Rain may not have worked with any other control scheme, is that everything in the game revolves around the story. This isn't something where Quantic Dream came up with some cool scenes and then wrapped a story around everything to tie it together; the story is the utmost focus, and everything that you do and everything that happens directly feeds into it, without exception. Without having a "defined" control scheme that only allows you to perform a set number of actions, the changing control options allow the mechanics to adapt to what makes sense for your character to do at any point to keep the storytelling as unopposed as possible.

My one complaint about the control scheme is that it's sometimes hard to tell what you're supposed to do. When your character is frazzled, the button or text options that pop up can be blurred and jittery to show that the person is tense as well as make it a little trickier to choose the right thing (you might say something wrong if you're not careful, like in real life). The problem is that button prompts will also pulse if you're supposed to tap them quickly rather than hold them down or do a single, quick tap, and distinguishing between these variants can be tricky. It's not a game-breaking problem, but I messed up in a few places where I wouldn't have had the prompts been clearer.

Now, as I mentioned, the controls do a great job of allowing the story to shine through, and what a story it is. Each of the four, main playable characters is interesting, developed well and important to the story. The way that everything comes together and winds up feeding into the story progression is nothing short of fantastic. Games have come pretty far in terms of how well stories are told and the level of writing quality that some of them are able to achieve, but Heavy Rain is easily amongst the best that's ever been put onto a disc. Were this filmed as a Hollywood picture, it would perfectly fit the body of work of someone like Martin Scorsese or David Fincher.

Now, that doesn't mean that the story is told flawlessly. Like I said at the start of this review, the first couple hours are a little slow. As I've mentioned in previous coverage for Heavy Rain, this is largely due to the fact that, with a film, you're able to edit out dull bits like walking down stairs or going from the kitchen to the living room. The exposition and character development that happens in these opening chapters wind up being very important to what happens later, but the pacing is a little on the sluggish side. And, when some of the first things that you're able to do include drinking orange juice and taking a shower, it may seem like things will get lost in unimportant actions and details of everyday life. But, like I've said, after you get into the meat of the game, it picks up quickly and pulls you in.

The art direction is great.An important element of Heavy Rain's design is that it isn't an entirely linear story (and therefore game). Depending upon how you handle situations, you can start steering the story that you experience in a different direction than others. If a main character dies, the game will continue on anyway, but you'll miss story clues and scenes that the now-dead character would have come across.

[2]