Post by The Lord of Blades on Jan 4, 2011 4:40:22 GMT -5
The following review expresses the opinions and positions of the author! It also has a few spoilers, but nothing overly major or identifiable. Regardless, enjoy!
Having recently played through Heavy Rain at the request of a friend, on the friend's PS3 as well, I can safely say I'm happy I hadn't invested into it myself. All the ads, reviews, and hype surrounding this game (and I use the term 'game' loosely) painted it as an interactive movie. There was also a lot of talk about it 'redefining' storytelling and it being a large step towards a new form of game and new epic stories. Let me just say, if this is the future of games... then I'm all for it, because the potential is CLEARLY there, but it is completely missed in this game. This game is an abysmal wreckage of game-play brutally shoehorned into a movie-style presentation that simply does not work to accommodate it. It is also riddled with pacing so awful that half the game is completely irrelevant and the other half is schizophrenic.
The first, and all-consuming, failure of this game is in its game-play. Characters move poorly at the best of times, and at others will wander around aimlessly in corners, unable to escape the terrible confines of oxygen particles drifting lazily through the air around them. Don't expect to arrive anywhere with any sense of urgency whatsoever, your characters always move with a lurching stride so slow it half makes the player wonder if the character is waiting to be carried. Turning is nightmarish, investigating rooms is beyond tedious, and any sense of urgency is lost when you're trying to do something important and your character can't figure out which way they should be facing. Your character almost inevitably moves so slow the rest of the world seems to be in fast forward. The only time this is not the case and actually matters, coincidentally enough, is when you're walking with an NPC who, you guessed it, walks slower than you. Thanks Heavy Rain, thanks for hammering in just how awful moving is. What's worse, the control scheme forces you to use the L-Analog stick to choose your direction (look) and the R2 button to actually walk. Mind you, sometimes 'looking' will cause your character to completely turn, and it is on some unseen pivot point; meaning if there is a usable item or point of interest right on that line, you will turn past it and back dozens of times before you simply run across the room and back to try and line up with it better... because god help you if try to actually turn your character with the walk button to better line it up. This never serves a purpose either, there are maybe three to five instances in the game where you can 'look around' and not move, and in every one of these instances your character is immobilized anyway... so why the hell is the R2 button so heavily relied on for absolutely no reason? It is infinitely frustrating and ultimately uncomfortable. This is not to mention that interacting with objects is hit or miss. Each one is synced up to maybe a 2ยบ area, meaning you will frequently pass them or be unable to interact without lining up perfectly; which, as you may have guessed from the above, is unbelievably annoying.
Heavy Rain also makes extreme use of quick-time-events (QTEs), in fact, making use almost exclusively of them aside from walking. Unfortunately, rather than the QTEs being simplistic and key-reactionary, they're more like games of Twister with someone who hates you getting to pick which color/limb next. Sometimes (see: often) you will fail a particular task entirely because the game asks you to press and hold several keys you just flat-out were not in position to press. So you set the controller down, and pick it up with your fingers ready to press [ ], ( ), and X while holding R1 and L2 and Down on the R-Analog stick. While some of these simulate realism well, easily 90% of them are just ridiculously annoying and atmosphere-breaking. In the middle of several critical scenes the player is too busy watching for button presses and trying to navigate the maze of coordinated controls to appreciate what is happening. Another enormous flaw here is the stressed elements of realism with the presentation of the QTE prompts. Is a character stressed? Their button presses start having spasms and seizures. Picking your next dialogue option? Hurry up! Those spiraling thoughts of your character will vanish in the next five seconds, usually before you've read half of them because they CAN drift unforgivingly out of camera focus. Similarly, many commands appear at angles like your character would be viewing them... which would be great if the camera let you see that also. Your character is NOT translucent for commands. Sometimes you will miss something entirely because the tiny arrow box appears behind your character for a fraction of a second. Also, the commands occasionally just do no good, particularly the ones involving moving the controller itself for motion control. Don't be surprised if fights, chases, and other situations drag out because you didn't sufficiently move you controller for your game to be satisfied.
Lastly, regarding the game-play at least, is that easily half of what you do has absolutely no impact on the game. In fact, in the earliest parts, you can quite literally let the game play itself. Several segments involve you just idly walking about looking for the trigger that advances the plot, only for the game to seemingly lose patience with your ineptitude and advance it for you. Not only does this make you care less about the game, it utterly destroys the significance of some events. Then the game also punishes the shit out of the player later on by making a single press in a QTE later change the entire game... one particular bastard of an input being a finicky motion control one that COMPLETELY alters the ending. Thanks, Heavy Rain, thanks for making the player either redo an hour of terrible game-play because you're such a finicky game with terrible game-play OR suffer the consequences of that awful game-play with extremely negative story results. It's like some kind of eternal-perfect-jackass loop where the loser is perpetually you, even when you win sometimes because the QTE didn't actually matter.
All of this horrible mess of game-play is compounded by the absolutely ridiculous pacing of the game. The first two hours of this game are easily ignorable for their barely-present level of interest. Then the game starts chucking fight-scenes at you, apparently aware that it hasn't done anything remotely necessitating the presence of actual player involvement yet (like setting out plates or brushing your teeth). Admittedly, the earliest of such fights is avoidable if you choose to, but the later ones start to go into the territory of absurdity. How many people can get hit in the head with large metal objects three or four times and punched about nine more and still keep fighting and flailing about? Moreover, one fight scene is a dream sequence that is literally never explained or mentioned again. Why did the girl dream about murderers breaking into her house? Doesn't matter. She's an insomniac. Oh wait! That didn't make any damn sense, why is the insomniac's intro a dream!? Again: terrible pacing shunting around an otherwise interesting story. Another such 'fight' scene involves a man shooting no less than 15 armed guards to death, killing every one in a single shot, never reloading, and all this after a Terminator1-esque entrance with his car through a building. It is so out of place, that despite trying to be a serious scene, it inspires laughter more than it does awe. Truly the only thing missing in that scene is the Unreal Tournament announcer's voice declaring his Godlike kill-streak.
It is things like this that just utterly obliterate what would be Heavy Rain's strongest point: its story. Even the sound has zero concept of what pacing it should follow, it will blast in at a moment's notice, but if you picked the wrong QTE sequence to follow, it'll fade back out to let you pick a different one (assuming the one you followed didn't get you killed). It is embarrassing the way the sound sort of comes and goes like an unsure child asking if its parent is watching when it does something 'cool'. Similarly, the change in character perspectives, while a good concept, is executed so poorly that it almost feels like commercial breaks at time: "and now for a segment with Madison! Why!? Because things were getting too interesting with Ethan!" The game seems almost afraid of exciting its players too much. As mentioned, it is actually a shame the pacing is so thoroughly garbage, because the story itself also struggles with pacing and character development. Some questions about characters are never answered or explained, and similarly, some characters fill only niche roles until the very end (and only if you successfully follow a few branching QTEs in the single right direction). The game even has multiple endings for the different characters. In an aside: one of the endings I saw was particularly humorous in that it contains an apparently anti-technology joke (that I didn't even get, I thought it was just drug delusions) that is so out of place it may as well have been tech-demo footage they snuck in.
Regrettably, the story of the game is a decent one following a serial killer and the efforts of the involved parties in saving his latest victim from a trademark fate. It's a gritty noir tale that, though heavily SAW-inspired, would succeed at being an interesting were it not for its presentation. While it does come across as cookie cutter, it has some compelling moments going for it, and if properly packaged, arranged, and presented, would create an interesting and enthralling tale. As it stands now, however, Heavy Rain is an absolute travesty of a game. Perhaps what makes it worse than anything else, is the missed the potential. There is one scene, one sequence in the game, where the player can truly feel the visceral and powerful nature of things through prompts that perfectly sync with the QTEs (with the fewest number of misleading prompt-boxes and ill-formed command chains ever). If the entire game were like it, it would be a blindingly good experience that would be hard to even properly word. Unfortunately, at all other times, the game is pointless decisions buried in a painful interface with the occasional actually important moment thrown in randomly for maximum frustration when it is missed.
In the long run? Avoid this game. It would work better if it was a book, movie, or even text-based adventure. It is sad to see a high-definition venture into the territory of things like Space Quest and King's Quest fall abysmally short of even those original games whose template it inadvertently shares. If you truly have to see what the fuss is about, get someone else to play it while you watch, the experience will be infinitely more enjoyable. It may seem like you're "giving up control" of where the story goes, but you're really only giving up the illusion of control. Hopefully any game that follows in Heavy Rain's footsteps will demonstrate the potential a game of this type actually allows for: alterable endings, better player involvement, more gripping immersion... you know... all the things games have as an advantage over movies and books.
Heavy Rain, however, is a terrible game. It gets a 2/10 only because it genuinely does look good graphics-wise, and there is the semblance of a good story buried under all the refuse of pacing, gameplay, and dozens of other design flaws heaped in mountain-quantities atop it.
Having recently played through Heavy Rain at the request of a friend, on the friend's PS3 as well, I can safely say I'm happy I hadn't invested into it myself. All the ads, reviews, and hype surrounding this game (and I use the term 'game' loosely) painted it as an interactive movie. There was also a lot of talk about it 'redefining' storytelling and it being a large step towards a new form of game and new epic stories. Let me just say, if this is the future of games... then I'm all for it, because the potential is CLEARLY there, but it is completely missed in this game. This game is an abysmal wreckage of game-play brutally shoehorned into a movie-style presentation that simply does not work to accommodate it. It is also riddled with pacing so awful that half the game is completely irrelevant and the other half is schizophrenic.
The first, and all-consuming, failure of this game is in its game-play. Characters move poorly at the best of times, and at others will wander around aimlessly in corners, unable to escape the terrible confines of oxygen particles drifting lazily through the air around them. Don't expect to arrive anywhere with any sense of urgency whatsoever, your characters always move with a lurching stride so slow it half makes the player wonder if the character is waiting to be carried. Turning is nightmarish, investigating rooms is beyond tedious, and any sense of urgency is lost when you're trying to do something important and your character can't figure out which way they should be facing. Your character almost inevitably moves so slow the rest of the world seems to be in fast forward. The only time this is not the case and actually matters, coincidentally enough, is when you're walking with an NPC who, you guessed it, walks slower than you. Thanks Heavy Rain, thanks for hammering in just how awful moving is. What's worse, the control scheme forces you to use the L-Analog stick to choose your direction (look) and the R2 button to actually walk. Mind you, sometimes 'looking' will cause your character to completely turn, and it is on some unseen pivot point; meaning if there is a usable item or point of interest right on that line, you will turn past it and back dozens of times before you simply run across the room and back to try and line up with it better... because god help you if try to actually turn your character with the walk button to better line it up. This never serves a purpose either, there are maybe three to five instances in the game where you can 'look around' and not move, and in every one of these instances your character is immobilized anyway... so why the hell is the R2 button so heavily relied on for absolutely no reason? It is infinitely frustrating and ultimately uncomfortable. This is not to mention that interacting with objects is hit or miss. Each one is synced up to maybe a 2ยบ area, meaning you will frequently pass them or be unable to interact without lining up perfectly; which, as you may have guessed from the above, is unbelievably annoying.
Heavy Rain also makes extreme use of quick-time-events (QTEs), in fact, making use almost exclusively of them aside from walking. Unfortunately, rather than the QTEs being simplistic and key-reactionary, they're more like games of Twister with someone who hates you getting to pick which color/limb next. Sometimes (see: often) you will fail a particular task entirely because the game asks you to press and hold several keys you just flat-out were not in position to press. So you set the controller down, and pick it up with your fingers ready to press [ ], ( ), and X while holding R1 and L2 and Down on the R-Analog stick. While some of these simulate realism well, easily 90% of them are just ridiculously annoying and atmosphere-breaking. In the middle of several critical scenes the player is too busy watching for button presses and trying to navigate the maze of coordinated controls to appreciate what is happening. Another enormous flaw here is the stressed elements of realism with the presentation of the QTE prompts. Is a character stressed? Their button presses start having spasms and seizures. Picking your next dialogue option? Hurry up! Those spiraling thoughts of your character will vanish in the next five seconds, usually before you've read half of them because they CAN drift unforgivingly out of camera focus. Similarly, many commands appear at angles like your character would be viewing them... which would be great if the camera let you see that also. Your character is NOT translucent for commands. Sometimes you will miss something entirely because the tiny arrow box appears behind your character for a fraction of a second. Also, the commands occasionally just do no good, particularly the ones involving moving the controller itself for motion control. Don't be surprised if fights, chases, and other situations drag out because you didn't sufficiently move you controller for your game to be satisfied.
Lastly, regarding the game-play at least, is that easily half of what you do has absolutely no impact on the game. In fact, in the earliest parts, you can quite literally let the game play itself. Several segments involve you just idly walking about looking for the trigger that advances the plot, only for the game to seemingly lose patience with your ineptitude and advance it for you. Not only does this make you care less about the game, it utterly destroys the significance of some events. Then the game also punishes the shit out of the player later on by making a single press in a QTE later change the entire game... one particular bastard of an input being a finicky motion control one that COMPLETELY alters the ending. Thanks, Heavy Rain, thanks for making the player either redo an hour of terrible game-play because you're such a finicky game with terrible game-play OR suffer the consequences of that awful game-play with extremely negative story results. It's like some kind of eternal-perfect-jackass loop where the loser is perpetually you, even when you win sometimes because the QTE didn't actually matter.
All of this horrible mess of game-play is compounded by the absolutely ridiculous pacing of the game. The first two hours of this game are easily ignorable for their barely-present level of interest. Then the game starts chucking fight-scenes at you, apparently aware that it hasn't done anything remotely necessitating the presence of actual player involvement yet (like setting out plates or brushing your teeth). Admittedly, the earliest of such fights is avoidable if you choose to, but the later ones start to go into the territory of absurdity. How many people can get hit in the head with large metal objects three or four times and punched about nine more and still keep fighting and flailing about? Moreover, one fight scene is a dream sequence that is literally never explained or mentioned again. Why did the girl dream about murderers breaking into her house? Doesn't matter. She's an insomniac. Oh wait! That didn't make any damn sense, why is the insomniac's intro a dream!? Again: terrible pacing shunting around an otherwise interesting story. Another such 'fight' scene involves a man shooting no less than 15 armed guards to death, killing every one in a single shot, never reloading, and all this after a Terminator1-esque entrance with his car through a building. It is so out of place, that despite trying to be a serious scene, it inspires laughter more than it does awe. Truly the only thing missing in that scene is the Unreal Tournament announcer's voice declaring his Godlike kill-streak.
It is things like this that just utterly obliterate what would be Heavy Rain's strongest point: its story. Even the sound has zero concept of what pacing it should follow, it will blast in at a moment's notice, but if you picked the wrong QTE sequence to follow, it'll fade back out to let you pick a different one (assuming the one you followed didn't get you killed). It is embarrassing the way the sound sort of comes and goes like an unsure child asking if its parent is watching when it does something 'cool'. Similarly, the change in character perspectives, while a good concept, is executed so poorly that it almost feels like commercial breaks at time: "and now for a segment with Madison! Why!? Because things were getting too interesting with Ethan!" The game seems almost afraid of exciting its players too much. As mentioned, it is actually a shame the pacing is so thoroughly garbage, because the story itself also struggles with pacing and character development. Some questions about characters are never answered or explained, and similarly, some characters fill only niche roles until the very end (and only if you successfully follow a few branching QTEs in the single right direction). The game even has multiple endings for the different characters. In an aside: one of the endings I saw was particularly humorous in that it contains an apparently anti-technology joke (that I didn't even get, I thought it was just drug delusions) that is so out of place it may as well have been tech-demo footage they snuck in.
Regrettably, the story of the game is a decent one following a serial killer and the efforts of the involved parties in saving his latest victim from a trademark fate. It's a gritty noir tale that, though heavily SAW-inspired, would succeed at being an interesting were it not for its presentation. While it does come across as cookie cutter, it has some compelling moments going for it, and if properly packaged, arranged, and presented, would create an interesting and enthralling tale. As it stands now, however, Heavy Rain is an absolute travesty of a game. Perhaps what makes it worse than anything else, is the missed the potential. There is one scene, one sequence in the game, where the player can truly feel the visceral and powerful nature of things through prompts that perfectly sync with the QTEs (with the fewest number of misleading prompt-boxes and ill-formed command chains ever). If the entire game were like it, it would be a blindingly good experience that would be hard to even properly word. Unfortunately, at all other times, the game is pointless decisions buried in a painful interface with the occasional actually important moment thrown in randomly for maximum frustration when it is missed.
In the long run? Avoid this game. It would work better if it was a book, movie, or even text-based adventure. It is sad to see a high-definition venture into the territory of things like Space Quest and King's Quest fall abysmally short of even those original games whose template it inadvertently shares. If you truly have to see what the fuss is about, get someone else to play it while you watch, the experience will be infinitely more enjoyable. It may seem like you're "giving up control" of where the story goes, but you're really only giving up the illusion of control. Hopefully any game that follows in Heavy Rain's footsteps will demonstrate the potential a game of this type actually allows for: alterable endings, better player involvement, more gripping immersion... you know... all the things games have as an advantage over movies and books.
Heavy Rain, however, is a terrible game. It gets a 2/10 only because it genuinely does look good graphics-wise, and there is the semblance of a good story buried under all the refuse of pacing, gameplay, and dozens of other design flaws heaped in mountain-quantities atop it.