OPM gives Heavy Rain 9 in world-first review & other reviews

[Spookie]

But then again, this is from Jim Sterling

You listen to IGN's reviews, you're not exactly one to comment. ;)

[rajputwarrior]

^ what's wrong with IGN reviews?

i watched the ign video review, pretty much confirmed me buying this game.

[Spookie]

^ what's wrong with IGN reviews?

Industry bias reviews- they give good reviews in exchange for page hits since they put up reviews before the embargo. So every dribbling moron rushes there to grab the score so they can justify their purchase. They also post flame bait when the ad revenue is low. Same with Game Informer (but that's a given since they are owned by ****ing gamestop).

[peacemf]

sounds good, but still its £38! hmmm, we'll see :)

[rajputwarrior]

Industry bias reviews- they give good reviews in exchange for page hits since they put up reviews before the embargo. So every dribbling moron rushes there to grab the score so they can justify their purchase. They also post flame bait when the ad revenue is low. Same with Game Informer (but that's a given since they are owned by ****ing gamestop).

i don't buy that, i have seen them have ads for games all over the front page, but then the picture or whatever on the front page that is linking to the review of the game says the game sucks... sometimes they actually say it sucks or worse in the wording of the headline. They're not gamespot...

[Spookie]

i don't buy that, i have seen them have ads for games all over the front page, but then the picture or whatever on the front page that is linking to the review of the game says the game sucks... sometimes they actually say it sucks or worse in the wording of the headline. They're not gamespot...

Gamespot have cleared up their act since that infamous firing, they were just unlucky enough to get caught out. IGN will do the same- happily fire you if you don't give the score the editor told you to and they'll replace you with a monkey who will.

Anyway on topic: Game looks nice. ;)

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

• Eurogamer – 9
• D'Toid – 7.0
• GamePro – 5/5
• Gamerzines – 90%
• Videogamer – 9
• Boomtown – 10
• Videogamesdaily – 9
• NowGamer – 8
• 1UP – A-
• PlayStation Lifestyle – 5/5
• IGN – 9 (video review below)
• play.tm – 90%
• Eurogamer.nl – 9
• Kotaku – N/A
• Game Informer – 9.50
• MTV Multiplayer – N/A
• GameReactor Norway – 9
• CVG – 8
• TVG - 10
• GamesRadar – 7
• Telegraph – 8
• IncGamers – 9.4
• GamersGlobe – 9
• Gamer.no – 8
• GameReactor EU – 9

Definite buy, good results for something so different (Y)

[SaltLife]

IDK, I hope it's going to be EPIC, But I'll see in a few minutes as I finally got the email from PSNetwork that it was available and I'm downloading it now :D

[D!ABOL!C]

What a demo. I am definitely sold on this game. I can definitely see playing this game multiple times just see what happens when you screw up. It kinda sucks we still have to wait for a week and a half, but it will be well worth it.

[peacemf]

hehe

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

One of the Heavy Rain sex scenes - http://www.allgamesbeta.info/2010/02/heavy-rain-interactive-sex-scene.html

NSFW

And no I haven't watched it, seriously, media blackout for me now.

[Sethos]

One of the Heavy Rain sex scenes - http://www.allgamesb...-sex-scene.html

NSFW

And no I haven't watched it, seriously, media blackout for me now.

God that was rubbish, I so had my pants unzipped for nothing.

[Massiveterra]

I really hope this game doesn't spawn a generation of pretentious gamers even moreso than people who were pretentious about Bioshock. Because based on this board and other boards I lurk, or in the comments of negative reviews, all I read is people saying "go back to a FPS," or "sorry you can't look down a barrel of a gun every 10 seconds." Kind of reminds me of the pretentiousness of movies like "Waking Life" or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or the pretentiousness of people who don't like Michael Bay movies. While I myself do enjoy the three types of movies, I don't feel it's fair to easily write someone off by saying "they don't get it."

So far, every defender of this game is just repeating bullet points of the press releases of this game, stating things like "it's taking the M-rated game to the next level" or "it's an evolution of the point-and-click game" or "it's not Dragon's Lair." But all of the doubters like myself "get it." It's just that we don't "buy it."

Although I myself wasn't too impressed with the demo, I am still looking forward to playing the game on the 23rd, and will probably play it at least 2 times. I just really hope that the decisions you make in the game really does affect major outcomes in the linear storyline.

[DirtyLarry Veteran]

Yeah I am really contemplating taking this off of my gamefly queue. I finally tried the demo last night and label me as part of the people that just do not get it. It was one long, long, long quick time event to me. Just not my cup of tea at all.

[Hedon]

hehe

Love it!

God that was rubbish, I so had my pants unzipped for nothing.

Blocked at my work. Does it show anything?

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

I really hope this game doesn't spawn a generation of pretentious gamers even moreso than people who were pretentious about Bioshock. Because based on this board and other boards I lurk, or in the comments of negative reviews, all I read is people saying "go back to a FPS," or "sorry you can't look down a barrel of a gun every 10 seconds." Kind of reminds me of the pretentiousness of movies like "Waking Life" or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or the pretentiousness of people who don't like Michael Bay movies. While I myself do enjoy the three types of movies, I don't feel it's fair to easily write someone off by saying "they don't get it."

So far, every defender of this game is just repeating bullet points of the press releases of this game, stating things like "it's taking the M-rated game to the next level" or "it's an evolution of the point-and-click game" or "it's not Dragon's Lair." But all of the doubters like myself "get it." It's just that we don't "buy it."

Although I myself wasn't too impressed with the demo, I am still looking forward to playing the game on the 23rd, and will probably play it at least 2 times. I just really hope that the decisions you make in the game really does affect major outcomes in the linear storyline.

That's fine if you're not impressed and or do not like, what's annoying at times is when people rant like this about pretentiousness when all of some of us gamers like are seeing experiences that are different.

I know this is a niche title, it's main plot is about a fathers love for his sun, not saving the earth, but I just so happen to be in the minority of people who don't just see gaming as what it's largely been moulded into, hence my crazy praise for smaller title like Flower as well.

I enjoy the lines between gaming and other mediums being blurred, some people don't but there's times it's the people who don't who become all in your face about it and start ranting off about how can anyone like this "game" and everything else instead of just ignoring it and getting on with the games they do like.

Blocked at my work. Does it show anything?

I've not watched it but I doubt it, Cage said the game is not "porn", so while there's probably some nudity/moaning etc, it'll be somewhat tastefully done - Again I'm not watching anything else from this game.

[Razorwing]

God that was rubbish, I so had my pants unzipped for nothing.

You mean you wore pants this time around Sethos? XD j/k :laugh:

[Massiveterra]

I know this is a niche title, it's main plot is about a fathers love for his sun, not saving the earth, but I just so happen to be in the minority of people who don't just see gaming as what it's largely been moulded into, hence my crazy praise for smaller title like Flower as well.

Yeah but I love Flower. And I love when designers try to do something different.

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

Yeah but I love Flower.

Flower is just an example of a title that's love or hate, which is what this game will probably be, but I've seen many people do the same thing with Flower curse it to hell as if "why does this even exist?".

All I'm trying to point out is developers are trying new ways to interact with/play games and tell stories, some will fail others won't, but everyone should appreciate the developers trying. What else will keep the industry booming? Plastic instruments are already nearly on their way out.

Anyway this has been receiving good praise for such a dangerous title to green light so I'm sure anyone interested will buy or at least rent, there was way no way the story was being given away in the demo, it was just for gameplay mechanics, this game lives or dies on story and I'm sure that's what most of the reviews have focussed on.

[Massiveterra]

Flower is just an example of a title that's love or hate, which is what this game will probably be, but I've seen many people do the same thing with Flower curse it to hell as if "why does this even exist?".

All I'm trying to point out is developers are trying new ways to interact with/play games and tell stories, some will fail others won't, but everyone should appreciate the developers trying. What else will keep the industry booming? Plastic instruments are already nearly on their way out.

Anyway this has been receiving good praise for such a dangerous title to green light so I'm sure anyone interested will buy or at least rent, there was way no way the story was being given away in the demo, it was just for gameplay mechanics, this game lives or dies on story and I'm sure that's what most of the reviews have focussed on.

I Get it, AB. Like I said in my post above, I get it. I get the selling points. I get the hype.

But I'm trying to look at this as objectively as possible. I'm trying to look at it as "a game." Not what it took to greenlight the game, not what it took to develop the game.

And right now all I've experienced is the demo, and all I know about it is what reviews and interviews have said about the game.

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

Kotaku's review, as some people like reading them as they don't score, just review and say thoughts

You're a man trying to rock a baby to sleep. You're a woman trying to look sexy for a sleaze. Who cares if you're having fun, as long as you're interested? You're playing Heavy Rain, a video game about people. Many years in the making and a successor to what could most kindly be called an uneven experiment, Heavy Rain is finally launching on the PlayStation 3. It's an ambitious video game from French development studio Quantic Dream, a game you don't have to worry about losing, but will fork and change depending on what you do. Progress in it is inexorable, but a happy ending is not inevitable.

But what is it exactly? It's a drama broken into several dozen chapters that advance the interwoven narratives of four playable characters: Distraught dad, FBI investigator, crusty private eye, insomniac lady. It's a mix of traditional ideas of character movement and dialogue options integrated with a control scheme style that might best be described as emotional. It's a serial killer whodunit. It's also a smartly-masked game that isn't about what it initially appears to be about. Its an exploration of fatherhood and of a notion that can be tough to explore in the potentially-desensitized medium of video games: The violent lengths a player will virtually go to accomplish a goal.

Loved

A Game About People: The most gripping element of Heavy Rain is the fact that it is propelled by recognizable human emotions. A player will sense the cues of what they are supposed to do next based on the most obvious of feelings: fear, lust, panic, concern, and so on. The game's boldly bland prologue chapter has the player controlling Ethan Mars, an initially happily married father of two. This level involves nothing more than Ethan getting out of bed, brushing his teeth, showering, deciding whether to work on architectural sketches before his wife and kids come home, helping to bring in the groceries when they do, maybe helping his wife by setting the table, playing in the backyard with the kids and that's about it. Through this, the player is learning the game's controls. They are also learning that this game assumes you will recognize, care about and act upon the implied emotions of doing and not doing such simple things. You can't not brush your teeth, sadly, but you can decline to help set the table. You can choose one son to play with in the backyard than the other. And maybe there will be consequences, maybe there won't. But the game will adapt to your choices and continue to ask you to make these kinds of subtle decisions. A few chapters later you're juggling the calls of duty of letting one of your sons watch TV or forcing him to do his homework. I played that chapter multiple times, once with the son loving me, once with the son hating me. That's the draw here before any local serial killer mystery gets added to this emotional mix.

A Game Of Uneasiness: Heavy Rain is uncomfortable, its designers skilled at putting the player in awkward situations and making them sort their way out of it. What choice would you make if you were in the back of a convenience store while a robber walks in and pulls a gun on the owner? Grab the frying pan, creep behind and whack him? Hang back and let it play out? Try to negotiate? The game is composed almost entirely of vignettes like this, behavioral laboratories that appear to have no Game Over wrong answer. I'd love to tell you about the five or 10 best ones, but that would spoil the fun. Well, here's a very vague and minor one: If you and your friend are being chased by the cops, what do you do? The game keeps raising its stakes, putting its players in one conundrum after another and is guaranteed to provoke the kind of "How did you handle that moment" conversations generated by the less subtle and less flexible interactive airport massacre in last year's Modern Warfare 2.

Emotional Controls: Heavy Rain looks like a good-looking action game even though it is more of a pretty 3D version of the 2D adventure games from where this developer-dubbed "Interactive Drama" gets much of its inspiration. The game is well-made enough to effectively render shootouts and rooftop chases, crowded nightclubs and shopping malls and the detailed, dank scenes of crime-scene murder. But within this visual context, Heavy Rain controls in an unusual way. A trigger moves the character forward, while a control stick guides them. Camera angles are fixed, often for the best view but, unconventional in modern games, often not behind the back. Dialogue is activated by button presses prompted by floating-text options, options that never spell out the next spoken line but provide a hint at the kind of thing that will be said. Action sequences are controlled through so-called Quick-Timer Event sequences, requiring the player to tap certain buttons at certain times during, say a fistfight, in order to land the next punch, dodge a blow, pick up a lamp to toss it at the enemy or whatever else has been choreographed by the game's designers. QTEs have been criticized as game designer crutches, a cheat that lets designers render flashy action without offering controls that give players meaningful involvement in what's going on. Heavy Rain, however, manages something smart and novel by working into this mix the requirement to sometimes use the PS3 controller's analog stick to trigger certain actions — slowly moving it to pull a frying pan off the wall without that stick-up guy in the convenience store hearing you, for example. That addition of analog prompts forces the player to be more subtle with their finger movements. What this all comes together as is a control scheme that sometimes demands feverish button-pressing and other times accepts only the gentlest of touches. When such a scheme is mapped to, say, gently rocking a baby to sleep with soft sways of the analog stick, the excellence of that mix shines through. We may not be mimicking the actions on screen, but pleasantly often in Heavy Rain, we are mimicking the attitude of those actions, the temper of the intent, the feel.

Almost All Grown Up: Heavy Rain's predecessor, Fahrenheit (released as Indigo Prophecy in the U.S.), offered much of what I've mentioned above but in cruder ways. It too aspired to present an interactive drama of emotional maturity, but by the time one of the characters was having sex with the reanimated corpse of another, it wasn't completely succeeding. This new game, by contrast, presents many moments of surprising maturity, from the aforementioned exploration of fatherhood to the multiple inversions of gaming's often lascivious presentation of attractive women. You may get the girl you're controlling to take her top off, but you may feel guilty about it later. The designers know what buttons their players are pushing and they have some buttons to push of their own. (One demerit to the game, though, for presenting yet another video game romance that I can't believe in for a second.)

Let's Do It Again: Rare is the game of supposedly deep branched gameplay and so much variety that you could Play It All Over Again But Differently that I want to actually play a second time, all over again but differently. But with Heavy Rain I did want to play many of its chapters again, to see how I could change events and make things happen differently. It doesn't hurt that people from the development studio let it be known that even main characters can die and stay dead. Really? Let's see if that's true…

Crime Scene Investigation: Controlling the game's FBI investigator character, Norman Jayden, provides a twist to the gameplay. When controlling Jayden, players can augment the virtual reality of the game world and search for fingerprints, bloodstains and other crime scene clues. Back at Jayden's office, players can sift through the clues. All of this is disappointingly the least open-ended of Heavy Rain's gameplay. There does not seem to be much variety in how you can go about investigating crime scenes as you hunt for the identity of the mysterious Origami Killer. But the way that you do these things is rendered in a visually interesting way, and adds just a dose of linear almost action-oriented gameplay that offers a nice change of pace to the otherwise play-as-you-like chapters. It also provides some satisfying opportunities to push the investigation forward in what turns out to be a pretty good murder mystery.

Hated

Distracting Voices: Speech is important in this game, but to my American ears I had trouble believing in the otherwise powerful virtual reality of this world when I heard actors speaking in what sounded like fraudulent American accents. The children, key characters in the game, are the ones who sound the weirdest. This won't bother some, nor will the occasional lack of precise lip-syncing, but it was the one thing that threatened to shatter the illusion and cheapen my emotional investment in Heavy Rain's world.

Movement Errors: As much as I liked the basic controls, Heavy Rain does have some of that fixed-camera old Resident Evil problem. You're pushing the stick one way as a character walks through a door. The camera angle switches. And suddenly you are disoriented, pushing the stick all the wrong ways and your brilliant private eye is walking in silly small circles. It doesn't happen often, but it's a pitfall Quantic Dream didn't manage to fully bound.

Sometimes Dull Lead Characters: Video game developers often have to decide whether to leave their playable protagonists as blank entities, the better for players to see themselves in the shoes of, or to make the lead characters distinct, a love it or hate it kind of persona. Three of Heavy Rain's leads are more of the blank type, which can make them bores compared to private eye Scott Shelby, who seems like an interesting and complex guy from the get-go. We all will have our favorites, and I finished Heavy Rain having enjoyed the times I felt I was more of a specific character and less of the time I felt I was controlling an avatar.

Heavy Rain is a strong effort by Quantic Dream. It succeeds as a game that doesn't need the constant killing and chaos that so many video games depend on to be interesting. It may ultimately be a murder mystery and an exploration about the lengths to which players might push the characters they control. But Heavy Rain is, at its frequent best, a game about emotion and subtlety, a game that doesn't condemn choices as bad but instead allows them to be different, allows them to be meaningful and allows the player to feel. This is a game for grown-ups or anyone who wants to feel like one.

Source: http://kotaku.com/54...rong-conclusion

Heavy Rain is a strong effort by Quantic Dream. It succeeds as a game that doesn't need the constant killing and chaos that so many video games depend on to be interesting. It may ultimately be a murder mystery and an exploration about the lengths to which players might push the characters they control. But Heavy Rain is, at its frequent best, a game about emotion and subtlety, a game that doesn't condemn choices as bad but instead allows them to be different, allows them to be meaningful and allows the player to feel. This is a game for grown-ups or anyone who wants to feel like one.

:)

[Sethos]

Those are some pretty nasty issues, the ones listed under "Hated" for a game like this.

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

Those are some pretty nasty issues, the ones listed under "Hated" for a game like this.

When taken into context with everything Kotaku say the game manages to deliver on I'd hardly call them nasty. Even just the words "a game for adults" being genuinely said for once as it's not violence/constant gun fire is enough for me to put up with quite a bit to play it.

[Sethos]

When taken into context with everything Kotaku say the game manages to deliver on I'd hardly call them nasty.

I will :p

[Hedon]

For me, movement errors, a couple dull leads and some weird voices would be the least of my concern. If that is the only hates from Kotaku, it's a great review.

Speaking of voices...I noticed in the demo that sometimes the voice didn't move with the lips. Nothing game breaking, but noticed it at first.