Ain’t No Sunshine… [Heavy Rain Demo Review]

Let me come clean straight off the bat here. I love a good crime game. Even point and click adventures such as CSI: Hard Evidence get me going. There’s nothing quite like getting your teeth into a good mystery. Or even a bad mystery, or even one where you know ‘whodunnit’ from before you even put in the disc. That’s why I’m so excited about the new video game experience from the creators of Fahrenheit: Heavy Rain.

Wait, not that…

That’s the one.

“ARI Comment:”

On first impression Heavy Rain shares a lot in common with its predecessor in that it plays almost like a film which needs your limited involvement in order to progress. The opening shot of one of the player characters Scott Shelby (who was captain of the alliteration club at school), parks his car involves the player by getting them to activate the handbrake and get out of the car, something that most games would think so routine they wouldn’t bother to include it. This is the object of Heavy Rain; to immerse you in its world. To drag you in until you feel like you can’t get out until this killer is brought to justice. After playing the demo, I can tell you it works.

The demo is primarily designed both as something of a tech display, showing you the remarkable depth in the game and also as a way to get you used to the controls because trust me, they take a bit of getting used to. This is not your normal over-the-shoulder game and the fact that pressing forward on the left stick moves your characters head instead of making them run is the first bit of proof you get.  Many other actions that you would associate with standard games are thrown out the window, into a bin and then promptly burned to cinder by this game. Fight scenes feel more real with time sensitive controls and even scaling a muddy slope is embellished with the need to hold multiple buttons in different orders. However, most actions in the game are contextual, adding somewhat to the feeling that you’re being guided along but there are obvious features which you may not pick up on and these will affect your progress in a very real way later on. It’s nice like that.

I’m not going to spend too long talking about the demo itself as you can all play that when it comes out on February 11th or get it by following Minihook’s guide to getting a code. I am instead going to talk about the radical departure that this game seems to be for a console developer. From memory, nothing leaps to mind of a game which explores the human psyche and the levels of desperation which different people feel when caught up in a murder investigation. Rest assured, game fans, this isn’t suddenly going to turn into a Zombie/Alien/Occult apocalypse halfway through. If I’m wrong we can all pop across the channel to Quantic Dream together and beat down their door demanding answers.

If you want a game that has the potential to rival the movies in both the cinematic experience and in the experience you get in the story then 20 minutes alone with Heavy Rain will convince you of its potential to be one of the games of 2010 and possibly the one that convinces snot-nosed game-cynics that video games are capable of being thought of as art. I’ll be picking this game up and providing you with a thoroughly more in-depth review as soon as humanly possible. In the meantime though, you need to play this demo because if it doesn’t convince you that this game could break the mould; nothing will.

I have no valid editorial reason for including this image.

Michael Park

Short URL: http://thegamershub.net/?p=3572

Posted by Michael Park on Feb 8 2010. Filed under Other, Playstation 3, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry