Heavy Rain is a cinematic adventure game, developed by Quantic Dream, that is to be released exclusively for the PS3 early next week. To get gamers excited about it, a demo has been released on the Playstation Network. Quantic Dream is same developer that produced Fahrenheit, which I reviewed in December of last year. In many ways Heavy Rain is the follow-up to that game, and it will have a dark story and cinematic game play, though this time around the game story will not involve the supernatural. However, it will take place in the future, and feature various pieces of science fiction based technology.
Having played the demo, I wanted to express some early thoughts on the game. First of all, as in Fahrenheit, this isn’t going to be a game. It’s going to be a movie that you have to press buttons in order to watch. For example in the demo, the first character you play as is a private detective, and after a panic attack the player has to press various buttons for him to first, grab his inhaler, second, lift the inhaler to his moth, and third pump the inhaler. The full game is probably going to have a lot of sequences like this, not game play, and not that fun. This was the main problem with Fahrenheit, and this game won’t be much different.
However, I will say this, I think that Heavy Rain is going to have a great story, and as far as I can tell this time around there are going to be more choices to make, and more ways for the game to end. I believe, that, once again, this game will be worth playing for the story alone. While very little has been released on the story, it is clear that rain is going to play a major role. Where Fahrenheit‘s underlying event was that the temperature continued to drop, in this game the inches of rain is going to increase, my guess is that by the end of the game the characters may be dealing with a full blown flood. This will certainly add to the suspense, and I think players are going to get a lot of emotion out of this game. I do plan on playing this game, eventually.
I do want to say that I’m not pre-ordering this game, and further I would not pay $60.00 for this game, simply because I don’t think it is worth that. It is a movie, and in my mind it is worth maybe a little bit more than a movie, because it is playable. It certainly won’t have the value of a game that has a lot more to offer. I would not pay more than $20.00 for this game. So, I might not be playing it for several years, then again this game might go down in value quickly simple because it won’t have much re-playability and used copies might be hitting the market quickly.
I think this is the type of game that hardcore fans our going to defend to the grave, they’ll be offended by any criticisms directed at it, and they won’t be able to admit that it has faults. It is also the type of game that others will buy, and be utterly disappointed, not realizing what they got themselves into. For them it will be an utter waste of money. I think there may be a lot of arguments over this game. Then again, maybe it will have a weak release, and no one will buy it at all, except for a few cult followers of Quantic Dream.