How far would you go to save the one you love?

Playstation 3

Enter the world of this new psychological thriller known as Heavy Rain. The Origami Killer is out there, taking the lives of young boys. How far will you go to stop a killer? (This review contains a few spoilers that occur in the beginning of the game).

Heavy Rain starts off with Ethan Mars, happily married, living with his wife and two children. Life seems as though it can’t get any better than it already is. That is until, an unfortunate event unfolds at the local mall. Your son Jason starts to wander off in the mall. Ethan keeps following him but eventually starts to lose him. Jason ends up crossing the street, and just when his father sees him, he decides to run back across. You can probably guess what is going to happen (unless you haven’t already seen the mall gameplay video). Let’s fast forward. You spend time with Shaun, the brother of Jason, at the local park. Suddenly you start to black out, wake up in the middle of the street, and have no idea where Shaun is. Thus, our story begins. You take the role of four different characters throughout the game. Constantly switching between them, you will learn that all of their stories intertwine with one another. You will play as Ethan Mars (Architect), Madison Paige (Photographer), Norman Jayden (FBI Profiler), and Scott Shelby (Private Investigator). This is not your typical game, during action sequences you will have to be quick with your fingers because Heavy Rain is heavily focused around QTE (Quick Time Events). Buttons will constantly appear on the screen, and you must hit them before time runs out. Messing these up could possibly alter what happens to your character, thus altering the entire game itself. Any and all of the four characters can die, and if that happens the game will continue on without them. There are multiple endings and many different choices to choose throughout your gaming experience. Some choices you will NOT want to make. Heavy Rain will make you so attached to the character that you may not want to make a tough decision. I found myself pausing the game at some instances where I had no idea which option I should pick.

Heavy Rain has an amazing graphics engine to it. Everything has such incredible detail that you may find yourself just walking around looking at all the little things and interacting with them. The world you’re in is so beautiful. I personally would have loved to have had a first person button just so I could look around at the little things better. I have to say that I think Heavy Rain has the most outstanding graphics to date.

The four main characters transfer their emotions to you so well that you may feel fully immersed. The facial animations match the dialog so well that you may not even realize you’re playing a video game. At times you may not notice the music playing, but it fits so well in most of the situations. The ambiance, voice acting, and music is all spot on. I have seen no issues at all.

This game has absolutely NO prerendered cutscenes. Everything you see is what you get, it is all ingame. If they were to have prerendered cutscenes, the only difference that we would see is some anti-aliasing, and a solid framerate.

I have only encountered one bug in this game. Sometimes when I was doing some crime scene investigating, my game froze right after Norman finished talking. I could hear the ambiance still, but the screen was frozen and I couldn’t use my controller to do anything. It has a constant autosave so if this happens to you, then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. This bug doesn’t bother me one bit because I was able to just restart my PS3 and jump right back in where I was.

Heavy Rain is roughly 8-10 hours in length, and has an amazing level of re-playability. You will probably find yourself going to play it again right after you beat it, just to see the other results for different options you choose. Combat is fun, story is amazing, and at some point you’ll find yourself yelling, “WHAT!? I DIDN’T EXPECT THAT!”

9.5/10