Hello, this is actually my first review ever and I'm still unsure about the coding. So it'll likely be one big mass of text for a review, so sorry in advance for that.
Anyway, sometime on July last year, the concept of buying a PS3 was laughable to me. £250 for a console that does the same job as an X-Box 360 which I already have and have a large collection of games for?! It was pure silliness in every sense. It was like buying a car, finding a slightly more expensive car but not buying that because you've only just bought your car, had it repaired several times by the manufacturer and fitted it out with the latest things like a CD player exclusive to that car and CDs that only work with that CD player. In other words, I had enough excuses to avoid the PS3. The exclusives, while seemed interesting, didn't offer anything that caught my eye enough.
However, then Heavy Rain came waltzing through the door and shaked it's money maker on the internet. It blew my mind enough that I decided it was enough of an excuse to go get a PS3. After all, if I shop around, I wouldn't have to pay too much right? Well, £300 later, I bought a PS3 and four games which I considered a bargain. After enjoying the four games I had (and playing X-Box 360 and PC games after they got boring) for about two months, Heavy Rain finally arrived on the scene.
Now, imagine the scene. You finally see a thick box with HMV written on it. You had never pre-ordered from HMV because you were convinced they were only specialised enough to allow you to put a pre-order in on something in the field of pop music CDs. You open the box after a bit of a struggle to find not only a beautiful front case displaying an origami figure in the rain, but the case is 3D. That's right, you can feel every little bump of the rain on your case (http://cdn.medialib.computerandvideogames.com/screens/screenshot_225544.jpg picture of the entire contents, including 3D case). You slide the main casing out of the sleeve to find the pack unfolds. The manual, as nit picking as it is, is terrible. While they went for authenticity which I will give credit for, the writing is faded, obscure and hard to read. Also, when did game manuals that fold out instead of be in a booklet format ever work? Is there a single game which you found the manual in a booklet format and just wished you could fold it out into an A3 piece of a paper displaying everything? The code for your free content sat on the right-side along with a strange piece of paper. The free content you got with the special edition pack was this: Downloadable content, soundtrack and a theme. This is assuming you found out in advance you should put the code in after the 4th of March. If, like me, you didn't hear about this and shoved the code in straight away, you only got the downloadable content and the theme. So now I have to fork out money to ring Sony after the 4th of March to get the soundtrack, making it now not free.
After you've shoved the game into the machine, you'll outfit your settings. Your difficulty and the brightness. After this, there is a very long load screen which works as an interactive set of slides of what to do with the said strange piece of paper from before. It allows you to make the crane from the front of the case with it. I will admit that no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't do it so I shoved the special piece of paper back in the case and clicked the start button.
Now, you may be confused of why I did go in depth of the casing. Besides it being relevant to how, almost, explorable it was filled with fascination of a game you've waited so long to play, it was to outline how good the casing is. It uses cardboard as it's sleeving with that is correctly glued together. This may sound like a weird thing to comment, but in terms of special edition games, most of them have sleeves that are somewhat damaged. Not through ill-use at all, but because of how easily breakable they are. The Kane And Lynch: Dead Men case is beginning to break apart near the edge, the Modern Warfare 2 case is collapsing, the Devil May Cry 4 and Resident Evil 5 casing has scratches of where the paint is coming off the plastic and Borderland's bottom is beginning to wear away because of the bottom of the case slightly catching the sleeve as it goes in and out. Heavy Rain case, however, while isn't strong, seems pretty wear resistant. My only problem with it is the side that sticks out from the sleeve is diagonal instead of vertical, but it's minor.
Anyway, onto the game which I will admit hasn't been completed yet. For starters, it's single player so no multi-player. Is this a bad thing? By all means no. Developers for some reason seem obsessed with putting multi-player in their games only to ignore some problems with single player like length and to create problems like bugs, server problems and a generally weak multi-player which only serves to drag a game down. To set out the basic plot, you play as four characters: Ethan Mars, a dad who ends up with one son dead, divorced and the other son missing, Scott Shelby, a private detective with asthma who has been hired to investigate the murders, Norman Jayden, a FBI detective with a serious drug problem, and Madison, a woman who suffers from chronic insomnia due to fears of her apartment being broken in and her being murdered in the process which is elevated when she sleeps in motels. All four characters are centralised around one basic plot: Find the origami killer and save Ethan Mars's son before he drowns.
When you first step into the shoes of Ethan Mars as he must get up, get in the shower, clean his teeth, put some clothes on and wonder around the house for a while, you will be astounded. The graphics is something you can tell this game relies on somewhat. This may sound like a negative point, but it's positive since it's goal is incredibly different from your average game. Your average game isn't plot-focused, it's usually game-play focused. The game operates by having a pre-determined plot line with different branches. Sure, you have to find the murderer, but different things can happen. For instance, during the clock/type-writer store scene with Scott Shelby, if you don't clean everything you've touched at the end, you'll end up at the police station explaining what happened. This is just an example of the different branches this game offers.
One thing I will heavily thank the game for, and this is something that is rarely recognised, is it rewards people for solving puzzles (e.g. what was your son wearing when he went missing), but doesn't hold it against you if you don't manage to complete it. The puzzles also don't reward people for thinking the developer, but rather by using their own intelligence. There are some instances that conversations can only work out if you think like the developer (e.g. you have to know that you shouldn't buy out the prostitute for further information when she refuses to talk about her son since she's a prostitute anyway and there-fore values some things beyond money like her son, that it's better to try to convince her by playing to her emotions and telling her if she doesn't help, then more mothers will find their sons on wastelands). Silent Hill series is one example that forces you to solve puzzles and wouldn't allow you to continue if you don't. While this isn't problematical, it's something that could be done without since it will allow people that simply don't have a clue to carry on with the story. Sure, they'll be punished in a way (like they may not get ammo for their guns, first-aid packs and keys for short-cuts), but it doesn't force people to think like a developer to get anywhere.
Now, for the quick time events; the infamous quick time events. This is something that haunts people constantly day and night, making people cross their fingers behind their backs as they approach the counter of their nearest game store, hoping that the game they have in their free hand does not contain quick time events. It's almost as infamous as Duke Nukem: Forever. One game that annoyed people with quick time events was Quantic Dream's previous game Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy in the US due to a film being released there called Fahrenheit 9/11 staring an over-weight ego-maniacal Michael Moore). Quick times events were often somewhat random and it relied a full 100% of button presses to win. If you missed one, you died. Considering some parts required abnormally fast reflexes, it got very tiresome. In this game, while it's pretty random, it feels somewhat prepared. You're doing thumb-stick movements anyway to do things. For instances, after your son goes missing, prepare to dodge the truck. I didn't expect it. Luckily, it doesn't always require 100% precision to pass. You can make a few clumsy mistakes like falling over on the ice while chasing after a fugitive or miss the part you were meant to breath in during a stressful situation. However, they use their different types of way to initiate a movement to the full extent. While this isn't annoying usually, I will full out say that chances are you will drop your drug while in the garage with Mad Jack right here. It may be a spoiler, but the chances of you being able to hold down all four or five buttons to initiate the action correctly is thin and if you miss one button while holding them all down one by one, then you drop it. This isn't really the end of the world, but then you're left to defend for your life in the scene after.
As much of a negative as that sounds, it's good in it's own way. It's not linear, but some actions are left to be a lot harder than normal, some practically impossible. The actions on the controller (or with the controller) usually match up with the action you are doing. However, I can't quite shake the feeling that while it may be one of the best examples of quick time events done right, it does has slight flaws like being expected to shake the controller in a certain manner during a quick time event just catches you off guard, but maybe that's just me still getting used to the PS3? The non-quick time event actions also work well and work with the controller to the point that if you do it slowly, you can see the character doing it just as you're moving the controller. Like say, to open the car, you move the right analogue stick left. You can do it slowly to watch your character slowly grab the door handle and pull it. It's also not to the extent that it becomes incredibly tedious. There's the golf scene that made me somewhat a bit annoyed, but that's it. You'll usually have a pretty good idea of what you have to do, without it being so easy it's laid out in front of you.
My only big complaint is this: Why the R2 stick to move and the bizarrely difficult way to move the left analogue stick to move in a direction? Why does it rarely move the direction I tell him to move? I press forward and it goes backwards, I press left, and he turns around and goes backwards. This isn't a hard concept to manage here. Left analogue stick to move. I don't mind the right analogue stick not being camera since they're doing something with it that it A LOT better (and if you're that desperate, there's a button to shift from over-the-head view and environment view), but the left stick? Why not hold R2 to stand still and to be able to look in a certain way? Why R2 to move forward and left stick to clumsiness go the way you want to go (which got very frustrating when I had to crawl around on one point). I know the idea of "if it's not broken, don't fix it" is a very flawed concept because it's broken if it feels dated and not different enough and you don't want broken games, but we're at a stage where control schemes should be pretty much universal. You should be able to pick up one game, play it, pick up another and then be able to do pretty much the same things with the same buttons besides some needed changes. While it isn't a problem that destroys the game completely, it does affect it and I'll be surprised if you're not frustrated at one point or another with the moving scheme. There's also a problem about the questionable lack of how replayable it is, but who cares at this point?
Anyway, in conclusion, what this game does it does right. The story is absolutely superb with graphics that only help you become immersed into the game completely and quick-time events that are a core-enough aspect of game-play to not be a random after-thought but not frequent enough to be annoying and tedious. The way you do actions is close enough to the action your character does that it's something you will never, or at least take a very long time to, grow tired of. While I can't judge the full game since the game has actually only been half completed for me, so far it's a very good game and it would have to take an absolute royal dive to ruin it for me. The achievements aren't tedious but actually easy to get, which for a game like this is good. The main complaint is the controls, but with every game you get a problem no matter how small. Usually I'm not immersed in games, but this one I was, which probably says a lot.
If I could sum this game up in one word, it would simply be: Fresh. It's a fresh face you've never seen before but you can't help but smile at. It's not even faux-fresh like the Lego series was. It's not just a head out of a window of a stuffy room fresh. It's Airwaves chewing gum put up your arse, being forced to chew on car air-freshener with those spray air-fresheners being sprayed up your nose while in the highlands of Scotland. That's how fresh it really is.
Recommendation: If you have a PS3 and you're not one of those gamers that must be able to kill something every five minutes, buy it. It's long and it's fun. If you don't have a PS3, this is an excuse to get one and a very good one at that.
Anyway, sometime on July last year, the concept of buying a PS3 was laughable to me. £250 for a console that does the same job as an X-Box 360 which I already have and have a large collection of games for?! It was pure silliness in every sense. It was like buying a car, finding a slightly more expensive car but not buying that because you've only just bought your car, had it repaired several times by the manufacturer and fitted it out with the latest things like a CD player exclusive to that car and CDs that only work with that CD player. In other words, I had enough excuses to avoid the PS3. The exclusives, while seemed interesting, didn't offer anything that caught my eye enough.
However, then Heavy Rain came waltzing through the door and shaked it's money maker on the internet. It blew my mind enough that I decided it was enough of an excuse to go get a PS3. After all, if I shop around, I wouldn't have to pay too much right? Well, £300 later, I bought a PS3 and four games which I considered a bargain. After enjoying the four games I had (and playing X-Box 360 and PC games after they got boring) for about two months, Heavy Rain finally arrived on the scene.
Now, imagine the scene. You finally see a thick box with HMV written on it. You had never pre-ordered from HMV because you were convinced they were only specialised enough to allow you to put a pre-order in on something in the field of pop music CDs. You open the box after a bit of a struggle to find not only a beautiful front case displaying an origami figure in the rain, but the case is 3D. That's right, you can feel every little bump of the rain on your case (http://cdn.medialib.computerandvideogames.com/screens/screenshot_225544.jpg picture of the entire contents, including 3D case). You slide the main casing out of the sleeve to find the pack unfolds. The manual, as nit picking as it is, is terrible. While they went for authenticity which I will give credit for, the writing is faded, obscure and hard to read. Also, when did game manuals that fold out instead of be in a booklet format ever work? Is there a single game which you found the manual in a booklet format and just wished you could fold it out into an A3 piece of a paper displaying everything? The code for your free content sat on the right-side along with a strange piece of paper. The free content you got with the special edition pack was this: Downloadable content, soundtrack and a theme. This is assuming you found out in advance you should put the code in after the 4th of March. If, like me, you didn't hear about this and shoved the code in straight away, you only got the downloadable content and the theme. So now I have to fork out money to ring Sony after the 4th of March to get the soundtrack, making it now not free.
After you've shoved the game into the machine, you'll outfit your settings. Your difficulty and the brightness. After this, there is a very long load screen which works as an interactive set of slides of what to do with the said strange piece of paper from before. It allows you to make the crane from the front of the case with it. I will admit that no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't do it so I shoved the special piece of paper back in the case and clicked the start button.
Now, you may be confused of why I did go in depth of the casing. Besides it being relevant to how, almost, explorable it was filled with fascination of a game you've waited so long to play, it was to outline how good the casing is. It uses cardboard as it's sleeving with that is correctly glued together. This may sound like a weird thing to comment, but in terms of special edition games, most of them have sleeves that are somewhat damaged. Not through ill-use at all, but because of how easily breakable they are. The Kane And Lynch: Dead Men case is beginning to break apart near the edge, the Modern Warfare 2 case is collapsing, the Devil May Cry 4 and Resident Evil 5 casing has scratches of where the paint is coming off the plastic and Borderland's bottom is beginning to wear away because of the bottom of the case slightly catching the sleeve as it goes in and out. Heavy Rain case, however, while isn't strong, seems pretty wear resistant. My only problem with it is the side that sticks out from the sleeve is diagonal instead of vertical, but it's minor.
Anyway, onto the game which I will admit hasn't been completed yet. For starters, it's single player so no multi-player. Is this a bad thing? By all means no. Developers for some reason seem obsessed with putting multi-player in their games only to ignore some problems with single player like length and to create problems like bugs, server problems and a generally weak multi-player which only serves to drag a game down. To set out the basic plot, you play as four characters: Ethan Mars, a dad who ends up with one son dead, divorced and the other son missing, Scott Shelby, a private detective with asthma who has been hired to investigate the murders, Norman Jayden, a FBI detective with a serious drug problem, and Madison, a woman who suffers from chronic insomnia due to fears of her apartment being broken in and her being murdered in the process which is elevated when she sleeps in motels. All four characters are centralised around one basic plot: Find the origami killer and save Ethan Mars's son before he drowns.
When you first step into the shoes of Ethan Mars as he must get up, get in the shower, clean his teeth, put some clothes on and wonder around the house for a while, you will be astounded. The graphics is something you can tell this game relies on somewhat. This may sound like a negative point, but it's positive since it's goal is incredibly different from your average game. Your average game isn't plot-focused, it's usually game-play focused. The game operates by having a pre-determined plot line with different branches. Sure, you have to find the murderer, but different things can happen. For instance, during the clock/type-writer store scene with Scott Shelby, if you don't clean everything you've touched at the end, you'll end up at the police station explaining what happened. This is just an example of the different branches this game offers.
One thing I will heavily thank the game for, and this is something that is rarely recognised, is it rewards people for solving puzzles (e.g. what was your son wearing when he went missing), but doesn't hold it against you if you don't manage to complete it. The puzzles also don't reward people for thinking the developer, but rather by using their own intelligence. There are some instances that conversations can only work out if you think like the developer (e.g. you have to know that you shouldn't buy out the prostitute for further information when she refuses to talk about her son since she's a prostitute anyway and there-fore values some things beyond money like her son, that it's better to try to convince her by playing to her emotions and telling her if she doesn't help, then more mothers will find their sons on wastelands). Silent Hill series is one example that forces you to solve puzzles and wouldn't allow you to continue if you don't. While this isn't problematical, it's something that could be done without since it will allow people that simply don't have a clue to carry on with the story. Sure, they'll be punished in a way (like they may not get ammo for their guns, first-aid packs and keys for short-cuts), but it doesn't force people to think like a developer to get anywhere.
Now, for the quick time events; the infamous quick time events. This is something that haunts people constantly day and night, making people cross their fingers behind their backs as they approach the counter of their nearest game store, hoping that the game they have in their free hand does not contain quick time events. It's almost as infamous as Duke Nukem: Forever. One game that annoyed people with quick time events was Quantic Dream's previous game Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy in the US due to a film being released there called Fahrenheit 9/11 staring an over-weight ego-maniacal Michael Moore). Quick times events were often somewhat random and it relied a full 100% of button presses to win. If you missed one, you died. Considering some parts required abnormally fast reflexes, it got very tiresome. In this game, while it's pretty random, it feels somewhat prepared. You're doing thumb-stick movements anyway to do things. For instances, after your son goes missing, prepare to dodge the truck. I didn't expect it. Luckily, it doesn't always require 100% precision to pass. You can make a few clumsy mistakes like falling over on the ice while chasing after a fugitive or miss the part you were meant to breath in during a stressful situation. However, they use their different types of way to initiate a movement to the full extent. While this isn't annoying usually, I will full out say that chances are you will drop your drug while in the garage with Mad Jack right here. It may be a spoiler, but the chances of you being able to hold down all four or five buttons to initiate the action correctly is thin and if you miss one button while holding them all down one by one, then you drop it. This isn't really the end of the world, but then you're left to defend for your life in the scene after.
As much of a negative as that sounds, it's good in it's own way. It's not linear, but some actions are left to be a lot harder than normal, some practically impossible. The actions on the controller (or with the controller) usually match up with the action you are doing. However, I can't quite shake the feeling that while it may be one of the best examples of quick time events done right, it does has slight flaws like being expected to shake the controller in a certain manner during a quick time event just catches you off guard, but maybe that's just me still getting used to the PS3? The non-quick time event actions also work well and work with the controller to the point that if you do it slowly, you can see the character doing it just as you're moving the controller. Like say, to open the car, you move the right analogue stick left. You can do it slowly to watch your character slowly grab the door handle and pull it. It's also not to the extent that it becomes incredibly tedious. There's the golf scene that made me somewhat a bit annoyed, but that's it. You'll usually have a pretty good idea of what you have to do, without it being so easy it's laid out in front of you.
My only big complaint is this: Why the R2 stick to move and the bizarrely difficult way to move the left analogue stick to move in a direction? Why does it rarely move the direction I tell him to move? I press forward and it goes backwards, I press left, and he turns around and goes backwards. This isn't a hard concept to manage here. Left analogue stick to move. I don't mind the right analogue stick not being camera since they're doing something with it that it A LOT better (and if you're that desperate, there's a button to shift from over-the-head view and environment view), but the left stick? Why not hold R2 to stand still and to be able to look in a certain way? Why R2 to move forward and left stick to clumsiness go the way you want to go (which got very frustrating when I had to crawl around on one point). I know the idea of "if it's not broken, don't fix it" is a very flawed concept because it's broken if it feels dated and not different enough and you don't want broken games, but we're at a stage where control schemes should be pretty much universal. You should be able to pick up one game, play it, pick up another and then be able to do pretty much the same things with the same buttons besides some needed changes. While it isn't a problem that destroys the game completely, it does affect it and I'll be surprised if you're not frustrated at one point or another with the moving scheme. There's also a problem about the questionable lack of how replayable it is, but who cares at this point?
Anyway, in conclusion, what this game does it does right. The story is absolutely superb with graphics that only help you become immersed into the game completely and quick-time events that are a core-enough aspect of game-play to not be a random after-thought but not frequent enough to be annoying and tedious. The way you do actions is close enough to the action your character does that it's something you will never, or at least take a very long time to, grow tired of. While I can't judge the full game since the game has actually only been half completed for me, so far it's a very good game and it would have to take an absolute royal dive to ruin it for me. The achievements aren't tedious but actually easy to get, which for a game like this is good. The main complaint is the controls, but with every game you get a problem no matter how small. Usually I'm not immersed in games, but this one I was, which probably says a lot.
If I could sum this game up in one word, it would simply be: Fresh. It's a fresh face you've never seen before but you can't help but smile at. It's not even faux-fresh like the Lego series was. It's not just a head out of a window of a stuffy room fresh. It's Airwaves chewing gum put up your arse, being forced to chew on car air-freshener with those spray air-fresheners being sprayed up your nose while in the highlands of Scotland. That's how fresh it really is.
Recommendation: If you have a PS3 and you're not one of those gamers that must be able to kill something every five minutes, buy it. It's long and it's fun. If you don't have a PS3, this is an excuse to get one and a very good one at that.
rolouge.