SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
An entertaining crime thriller undercut by overly theatrical voice-acting and dated visuals, Heavy Rain is overshadowed by its successors.
The biggest problem with Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain is that, these days, it’s no longer unique. In its heyday, it was praised for everything from its mature gritty story to its realistic character models. No longer. With games such as Life is Strange, and of course Quantic’s very own Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain has been surpassed in almost every conceivable way. While its story remains an entertaining crime thriller bearing a few of the hallmarks of an excellent example of the genre, this half-hearted and dated port to the current-generation fails to make a compelling case for its return. As it stands, Heavy Rain is all washed up.
After his son Shaun is kidnapped by the infamous Origami Killer, a serial killer who drowns his victims in rainwater, architect Ethan Mars must race against time to complete a set of gruesome trials in order to save his life. Meanwhile, a chance run-in with Ethan sets journalist Madison Paige on his trail, while FBI agent Norman Jayden clashes with the local police after being sent to help them identify the killer. After private detective Scott Shelby is hired by the families of the killer’s victims, he too begins to hunt the killer. With a heavy rainstorm on the way, Shaun’s time is running out.
Setting aside plot inconsistencies and cringeworthy dialogue (writer David Cage lacks any self-restraint when it comes to cliché), the story engages. Much like a good crime film or TV series, Heavy Rain works because it hides clues in plain sight, and the fact that it can do that when its environments are fully open for the player to explore is commendable. The game’s twist ending is well-crafted, with an impressive build-up and setup. It also has something that’s still not too common in video-gaming even today: maturity. Some of its sequences are suspenseful and electrically charged with emotion. Good crime thrillers rarely shy away from depicting the darker side of the human psyche, and Heavy Rain is more authentic for that very reason. However, no genre conventions are broken. This is in essence an interactive murder mystery in the style of a TV crime serial, and those expecting something mind-blowing will be disappointed.
None of this is helped by the game’s characters, whose hammy voice-acting grates. The game’s non-American actors attempt American accents to varying degrees of quality. While you can suffer listening to Madison and Scott, the same can’t be said for Norman, or for Ethan, Heavy Rain’s lead. He’s entirely devoid of charisma, leaving a less-than-compelling first impression that only gets worse over time. It’s hard to care about the trials of the typical dad of the stereotypical nuclear family of suburban America, simply because it’s been done to death. Other than that, the cast is populated by stock characters and one-note performances; some have flaws forced on them that ultimately don’t add much complexity or depth. It’s surprising that Heavy Rain works at all given that even its best characters are little more than skin-deep.
Gameplay-wise, this game is clumsy. For whatever reason, it requires the right trigger button be held down whenever you want to make your characters move, rather than just giving you unencumbered movement. Heavy Rain just feels unwieldy. The game’s imprecise controls are a major source of frustration, especially when your characters’ lives are at stake. I reserve particular hatred for the game’s tilt controls, having double-checked my controller’s gyroscope on other games just to make sure my trusty DualShock wasn’t to blame for Heavy Rain not reading my inputs (and surprise, surprise it wasn’t). Even after using these controls for several hours, I was still occasionally walking straight into walls or bumping into furniture. Marry that with a camera that allows you to choose between two different but equally awkward angles, and a lot of fun is sucked out of the experience. Fight sequences have little impact for example. Even in retrospect, it’s hard to imagine that Heavy Rain’s controls would have ever been described as anything more than serviceable.
The graphics are a slight improvement over the game’s appearance on PS3, but look dated nonetheless. Both the game’s environments and character models retain the previous console generation’s low-resolution halfway house between polygons and realism. The lack of a true upgrade here means our characters look like melted waxworks, accompanied by jerky body and facial animations that lack the fluidity of current-gen. There’s just enough of the uncanny valley effect to keep you from feeling at ease. Heavy Rain’s lighting, which gives the game a moody intense atmosphere, is its only real saving grace in terms of graphics.
Thanks to its more accomplished successors, this game no longer gets a free pass because innovation or art. Perhaps that’s what it’s trying a little too hard to be. Let’s not discount the thrilling sequences or the tightly wound story however. This is a decent game with poor voice-acting, subject to a half-hearted port whose casual disregard for improvements only highlights how badly it’s aged. All in all, it’s hard to recommend it unless you’re bent on playing it again and your PlayStation 3 is broken. Rather than being atmospheric and rain-soaked, it’s just unpleasantly damp.
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