Heavy Rain is another cinematic experience, choose your own adventure style game. Playing Until Dawn lead me to trying out Heavy Rain and next on my list will be Detroit: Become Human. Heavy Rain is significantly better than Until Dawn, even though I don't think that the games are really trying to do the same thing. Despite the ease of comparison, which I am going to do frequently, I find the two games to be relatively distinct in most ways. The review will be spoiler heavy and if you haven't played Heavy Rain yet-want-to you should stop reading here. Scroll passed the Shrek for the review

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Heavy Rain is a murder mystery thriller in which you swap between several interconnected characters intertwined within the case of the Origami Killer, a serial killer that drowns victims in rainwater and leaves an origami figure in their hand. The game is heavy on the cinematography and works like a visual novel of sorts at times. I haven't played many games in this style and certainly even less as cinematographically well done as Heavy Rain.

My most recent experience with Until Dawn is the closest comparison I really have, and in the wake of playing Heavy Rain I feel like if I re-reviewed Until Dawn I'd give it a much lower score. Heavy Rain is a triumph in many ways, and I'm surprised this gaming style hasn't taken off even more since its release. I suppose the budget needed to maintain such a quality game is quite high. Heavy Rain gets almost everything right. Almost. Let's start with the good.

The writing in Heavy Rain is generally quite good. The story is riveting, the characters feel real and investing. The world is well developed enough. Sure if you sit here and look for holes to poke you're going to find them, but realistically Heavy Rain compares well to a season of the BBC show Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch. It's much of the same intrigue and allure. Figuring out all the moving parts while watching it unfurl from multiple viewpoints. And Heavy Rain is very much on that tier of show. It weaves and winds and keeps you actively trying to figure out the mystery all the while taking part in it.

The sound design and set design is also quite good. I didn't find myself walking aimlessly into corners or pointlessly searching for collectibles. Much of the game was pretty straightforward about what it is I should be doing and generally I didn't find myself fighting the controller to get these things done. I was given a few dialogue choices but in most instances those choices didn't change anything, at least anything substantial. Which I thought was a bonus, as it kept the story and the writing tight.

The story was mostly well-paced, I didn't find it overlong nor was I left almost hunting for the end. By comparison, during the third act of Until Dawn I felt myself almost begging the game to end. I'd been warn out, I was trying to get to the conclusion and they'd given us most of the mystery. The driving motivation of Until Dawn's narrative is revealed and disappears with three or so in-game hours left to play. Heavy Rain is paced very well and by the time the twist is revealed, you have maybe 45 minutes until the game ends. The rapid denouement is quite good and classic storytelling technique.

The active gameplay is pretty good too. The combat is fast and action-packed. Smacking a couple buttons or executing joystick swipes on such a short abrupt timer is surprisingly engaging within the story based gameplay. The combat feels fun. Flicking the stick around to respond to rapid paced quicktime events is almost sort of reminiscent of EA Sports Fight Night in a bizarre way. Complete with joystick maneuvers that mimic throwing hooks and uppercuts in the forgotten boxing franchise.

Heavy Rain is really good. Well-written, engaging controls and solid cinematography means that it nails just about every element. Even 11 years after its original release, Heavy Rain is still a great game. But it does have a few warts that keep it from being perfect.

While the writing is very good and the dialogue is very good, the voice acting is often quite poor. Very early on hearing Ethan scream JAY. SAUN. when calling for his lost child is not only jarring but it becomes god damn comedic. It sounds like Microsoft Sam or something. It's bad bad. There are some other moments too, though Ethan is routinely the worst voice actor in the game. The quality of the voice actors is generally quite poor which is a real shame. It's inverse Until Dawn, where the voice acting itself is generally very good but the script is awful.

In a fully voiced theatrical experience, having these moments is completely immersion breaking. It can rip all the tension and emotion out of a scene. And then flashbacks later with Ethan hollering JAY SAUN like a damned robot return like a bat to the nuts when Ethan's search for Shaun is at its peak. And there are others too though with Madison, Lauren and Norman occasionally having moments much worse in voice acting quality than Scott or Blake

While the story is quite good as well, I figured out the big reveal well in advance. Which is fine, but I read a number of articles talking about how no one saw it coming or that test audiences never knew who it was. At a certain point it became obvious to me that Scott was the shadiest character. Contact with all the victims, collecting evidence people were willfully giving him. Who calls a PI to investigate murders? Which families asked him? He meets four of the victims families and none of them had hired him, so who did? It was always clear Ethan wasn't the killer as he was the red herring. There was a brief time when I'd considered Madison to possibly be the Origami Killer and she was assisting Ethan in completing the trials but by the time she visited 'Doctor Death' it was clear it wouldn't be her. It's not a big subtraction from the score or the game itself, but I'd say halfway through the game, or maybe less even, I was convinced Scott was the killer.

The other issue is an issue that seems to plague all of these cinematic controls. The controls are a bit unreliable and in tense/fast-paced moments the controls just fail. Until Dawn suffered from this badly with the 'Don't Move' command. There were times where I set the controller flat on a table and failed the 'Don't Move' check. In Heavy Rain there were times where I moved the controller but the input wasn't properly registered.

The gyroscope and accelerometers seem to unreliable for the game, especially for key decisions. Twisting the controller rarely works on first try, god forbid they want you to twist it slowly. Slicing the controller leftward and rightward is similarly unreliable, often failing several attempts before finally registering. It's also not pleasant to make these sorts of full body motions from your couch, because anything short of a simulated sparring session and the game won't read the input. The half circle joystick maneuvers also seem to require a very exact precision to register. Which feels unreasonable in these fast-twitch timed quicktime events. There were a number of these sorts of instances but the fight between Mad Jack and Norman Jayden was particularly awful.

This is a real shame because otherwise I find the controls to be a positive and quite complimentary to the game's narrative. The combat against Korda in the meat locker or against Lauren's abusive customer were really seamless and fun. I liked that simple failures in the commands didn't cause you to lose the entire interaction, only repeated failures would. Felt like deeper gameplay. Though I will also say I hated how many button presses there were where failure didn't matter at all. Like the running and jumping button pushes where a failure would simply cause the character to reset for the jump. Those weren't pleasant. I didn't understand the point. If my inputs, or failure, have literally no effect on what's going to happen then why make me push them? Especially in the construction site flashback with Scottie and John where you can't fail any of the button commands. It's fifteen minutes of pushing buttons in combinations and you can't not do that. Lame.

Overall though, Heavy Rain is quite good. I am excited to play through Detroit: Become Human next because clearly Quantic Dream is a studio with a healthy command of this 'interactive drama' genre. The writing and filmography was quite crisp. The story was engaging and the characters were well written. I just had a blast playing it from start to finish. A really nice break from more conventional video game gameplay

Once you get past how clunky the control feel, especially with the fixed cameras for the most part, Heavy Rain is a brilliant story with plenty of options and ways to alter the outcomes of each of the characters. The story is wonderfully written and keeps you wanting to find the next piece of the puzzle as you go along. The voice acting leaves something to be desired as at times it comes off as disconnected and a bit flat, and could do with more variations when it comes to certain different actions.

For whatever reason, I waited a long time to play Heavy Rain, and can't say I was disappointed with the ending I got, I just wish that the performances from the characters had as much life in them as they did in the BTS acting tapes.

I know for a game like this, it’s definitely needs multiple playthroughs but honestly for what I got, I think it’s pretty damn good from start to finish story wise (for my playthrough at least).

I was very skeptical in the beginning with the REALLY bad voice acting and very hilarious prologue, but as the game progressed, I was very into the story, picking and choosing the best path to go about this.

As a script writer myself, I was going off of how I see this being a film, and I feel like a lot of people really enjoy that feeling of choosing and coming up with the best route to play this game. This is definitely an experience and I can’t wait to check out the other games Quantic Dream.

DAVID CAGE

STOP FUCKING MAKING GAMES

i still like you a tiny lil better than riot games

There's a lot about this game I actually like. Is it good? No, not in just about any sense - the voice acting is terrible, the writing is awful, the twist is nonsensical, the nonstop misogyny and racism are horrendous, and it's generally not even bad enough in a fun way to make up for any of that (like Indigo Prophecy could be.)

But there's something that drew me into this game in 2010 anyway. It felt so different, in terms of tone, setting, gameplay, everything, than anything else I was seeing in video games at the time, and there was something about that which I think grabbed me and didn't let go. Despite every reason I had not to, I still got drawn into this world and these characters enough to care about where they ended up. Those two aspects are why I think David Cage games generally continue to succeed. Even though there are far better, far more competent, and far less vile creators in the medium, his games still have that strange feeling that they shouldn't exist. I want to look for any nuggets of positivity about his games, any little bits I can scrape off, because I want more games like it made by better people.

My positivity nugget for this game is the achievement "The Perfect Crime," which for my money is the most clever and creative use of achievements I've ever seen.