Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Available on: Playstation 3

The long awaited and greatly hyped Playstation 3 exclusive Heavy Rain is finally here. Is it as great and game-changing as we’d all been promised? Well, unfortunately no.

It’s just about impossible to talk about the game without spoiling the plot so I’ll try to keep this review as focused as possible on the mechanics and design.

You play as four people, weaving in and out of each others lives, who have all been touched in some way by the Origami Killer. A person who has been gripping the city with fear the past three years and whose modus operandi is to kidnap young boys, drown them in rainwater, then leave the bodies to be found by the railroad tracks with a small origami animal left in one hand and an orchid laying across their chest. Yep, if you hadn’t have guessed it already the world of Heavy Rain is made from pretty grim stuff.

The whole game is soaked (*ahem*) in a rich David Fincher-meets-Saw gritty noir tone and it does a pretty damn good job of making you feel genuinely uneasy and sometimes even quite disgusted by the characters, their actions and what they’re put through and this is actually the games greatest strength. Being sucked into the bleak and twisted world of a serial killer from the perspective of his victims shouldn’t be fun and enjoyable. However despite it being the games greatest strength it also manages to be a huge reason why the game isn’t worth your time.

Heavy Rain is not fun. The plot manages to compel you through to the end in spite of its gaping holes and a whole lot of stuff that is left rather annoyingly unexplained, which I guess is worthy of some credit, but at no point is it actually an enjoyable experience to work through. In fact the only real time the experience came close to being fun was when it taught me how to make an origami swan during the installation process. I’m not even exaggerating here.

Gameplay, if you could call it that, is comprised entirely of three things. Walking, quick-time events and waggle. That’s it. There’s no shooting, driving, exploration or anything else that’s really familiarly ‘gamey’. Full props to Quantic Dream for trying something different but the whole thing just feels like they were trying desperately hard to make a sort-of interactive movie and along the way completely forgot what the videogame mediums strengths are.

The game is buggy too. Near game-breakingly so. Having lengthy scenes where the dialogue doesn’t sync up at all with the characters mouths or their lips move but no sound comes out is pretty unforgivable considering the game is intended to be a ‘movie quality narrative experience’. Bugs aside though their’s no denying how technically marvellous the game looks. The world is flawlessly designed so that it feels very real and lived-in and the digital actors are all beautifully rendered. The animation for the most part is pretty good but occasionally it will flip out and do something weird like stretch a characters jaw way down south or have their eyelids roll creepily. The voice acting is a pretty mixed bag too unfortunately.

Sadly the whole hook of how every choice and action you take with each character will deeply affect the plot doesn’t really work as promised either. No matter what you do up until that point, the plot still comes to more or less the same conclusion. Your choices really just boil down to determining which closing cutscene plays. Oh sure there are a few points along the way where, for instance, if you escaped the police at one time you’ll get a different next short level than if you get captured, but it’s really nothing particularly significant and hardly the revolution in game design they long told us it would be.

So basically yes, the game is crap. However! The collector’s edition does come with one amazing piece of interactive art that is Heavy Rain Chronicles 1: The Taxidermist. An only 20 minute or so long adventure where you’re tasked with investigating the home/business of a disgusting local man who invariably has one big horrifying secret lurking upstairs. This short episode, which is actually completely unconnected to Heavy Rain’s main story, is honestly my favourite gaming experience so far this year. It’s absolutely perfect in its pacing and building of suspense and atmosphere. The voice acting and digital performances are flawless and I haven’t been able to find a single bug in it yet either. It’s completely what the full game should have been but utterly failed to be, and I hope it goes up as an affordable, preferably stand-alone download on the Playstation Network soon so that more people can experience it.

So is Heavy Rain worth your time then? Sure. I mean, there really hasn’t been anything like it ever before so it’s worth a look on that basis alone, just for the love of God don’t go paying $90 for it.

Heavy Rain

The Good

- No-one has ever tried to make a game like this before

- Stunning to look at

- Some nice ideas to the narrative

- The origami swan it teaches you to make will look pretty on your desk

- It’s short

- The faux rain-drenched packaging on the collectors edition is very cool

- The Taxidermist

The Bad

– It rapidly becomes evident precisely why no-one has ever tried to make a game like this before

- Only one of the characters has any real charisma or personality and they even manage to make you hate him by the end too

- Apart from the visuals, the whole product lacks polish

- It’s short

- That The Taxidermist is by far the best part but it only comes with the collectors edition