Heavy Rain (PS3)

 Heavy Rain, which was developed by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, has been built up to be the future of gaming, but is it? Probably not, but it’s a hell of a game.

The game is presented through the eyes of four characters – swapping between them while they each try to find The Origami Killer. Now, I won’t spoil a thing, but I myself didn’t see the killer’s identity from a mile away. Sometimes the plot is outright ridiculously unbelievable (I’m sorry, but a police officer pulling a gun on an FBI agent and threatening to kill him is grounds for jail time, much less dismissal… not a “Hey, good job!”), but overall it’s a great story with a lot of different facets.

I’m going to say it outright. Quantic Dream, what the hell were you thinking by making R2 the walk button? It’s weird, it’s completely against the norm, and the movement controls are some of the worst I’ve ever experienced. However, the rest of the game, which is what you should be concerned with anyways, controls very, very well. Given the variety of quick time events and things to do – ranging from investigating crime scenes to cinematic gun battles – that thar walkin’ stuff is forgiveable.

Heavy Rain looks beautiful. The character expressions are extraordinarily lifelike, and the characters themselves are very believable. The game lives up to it’s namesake, given that it’s raining 99% of the time. But hey, the rain looks great, honestly. The entire game looks gorgeous. Now, the powerful orchestral score is very impressive, however, I got a bit tired of hearing the same, oh, I don’t know, 5 or 6 tracks throughout the entirety of the game. I’m being facetious, but you’ll definitely hear much of the same music. Luckily, it’s some impressive stuff. The thing that really throws me for a loop is the voice acting. It’s either very intriguing, with someone screaming as if they really HAVE just suffered a grievous physical wound, or some horrible voice acting not heard since the original Resident Evil for the Playstation. I also jokingly started calling this game Heavy Accent, because most characters inexplicably drift in and out of English-sounding and some weird unidentifiable accent.

I really couldn’t put the controller down. I’ve owned it for two weeks, and I’m still trying to go through and get all of the Trophies. This entails seeing all of the different ways a scene can play out, to seeing all of the 20+ endings. QD was very smart in including a Chapter Select. There’s a near-endless amount of replay value. I would give this bad boy an 8 out of 10.