We critique the PlayStation 4 re-master of Heavy Rain; does this noir title live up to its promise 6 years after its first release?
I‘m lying on the floor, covered in sweat and gripping the Dualshock 4, shouting at the screen while I hook the controller left and right to mimic the movement of a car veering through traffic. The car is going at 80kmph ““ on the wrong side of the highway. Next, I‘m snapping the triggers to avoid an oncoming punch in a full fistfight, and then stringing together a combination of R1 and X O Δ [] to hunker beneath an electrified fence in a power plant. Welcome to Heavy Rain, where every moment could be your last.
Six years since it was released on the PS3, Heavy Rain has lost none of its madcap tension. This new edition has been remastered for the PlayStation 4 and is the exact same game, barring a visual overhaul. At every turn, you‘re walking into high octane thrills spliced straight from the Hollywood thriller. The good news? Its interactive!
At its best, Heavy Rain reduces you to a primal animal as you fight and claw your way through its topsy turvy narrative. There were times I was sure those Dualshock triggers would snap right off.
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For returning fans, is it worth buying all over again? That‘s tricky, and depends entirely on how much you enjoyed the experience the first time around. The new graphics are impressive but not as good as industry standard. The voice-acting is still hit and miss. And while the presentation has been given a jolly good polish, there are still some blemishes that belie its age. Plus, there‘s little in the way of bonus content, barring 3 videos and 7 art galleries that were bundled with the original. It‘s really not good enough.
What I do know is this: if you‘ve never played Heavy Rain before, buy it right away. It‘s one of the most unrelentingly tense experiences I‘ve ever played and a fantastic feat of storytelling. In short, if you‘re like me and owned an Xbox 360 previously or are new to console gaming entirely, don‘t waste time getting your hands on this. It‘s the perfect opportunity to get acquainted with a classic before the mid-year flood of releases.
You’re Ethan Mars, a happy father of two. But you’re also Scott Shelby, a private detective, and Madison, a photojournalist, and Jayden, an FBI agent. When Mars’ son is kidnapped, the police suspect the notorious Origami Killer is responsible. But who is the killer? So begins a cat and mouse game as all four characters begin hunting the guilty party. It’s entirely possible to bungle the investigation and have your characters die midway through the story. This is a Quantic Dream game after all, where narrative threads spin off of one another and weave into a complicated interconnected web. It’s clear to see where Until Dawn got its complex butterfly effect idea from.
The good news is that Heavy Rain plays its story almost entirely straight, meaning there‘s none of the supernatural silliness that derails most interactive games. Instead, Heavy Rain is a good old fashioned cop drama. The four-pronged narrative means you‘re never coming to a standstill, and there’s plenty of David Fincher’s Seven thrown in there. The soundtrack in particular is fantastic.
A tick for the story then, despite the fact that some critics have called it over-the-top. But in my book, it has just the right amount of bombast for a moment-to-moment thriller.
To facilitate the heart-stopping drama, Heavy Rain uses QTE sequences, something that’s been done to death since its release. But Heavy Rain does them better. On the hardest difficulty, you’re stringing together intricate combinations of triggers and buttons while the action unfolds on the screen.
Ironically, outside of the QTEs, the controls are actually rather awkward. And you know what? That adds to the experience. In a game where the pressure is always on, not being able to trust your character’s movement makes it even more unbearably tense. Best you get a move on too, because if you don’t, the game will take matters into its own hands, making a decision that could alter the course of the story for your beloved character forever.
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What’s really exciting is the thought that people like me can play this game for the first time, in HD, on a new console. The game is available as a digital download on the PlayStation store or bundled alongside Beyond: Two Souls on a physical disc. We’ll have a review of Beyond next week, but I can let you into a spoiler right now: it’ll need to be excellent to touch Heavy Rain. While returning players have less to be excited about, in a game with so many narrative threads, even diehard fans are bound to find something they’ve missed before.
Critics would be right to complain that Heavy Rain on PS4 is the exact same game, with no genuine bonus content and little in the way of new features. But that would discount the 20-plus endings and fabled narrative that remain unchanged. In the end, this is a remaster designed for the thousands of gamers who never got a chance to play Heavy Rain the first time, and the fans that want to relive Ethan’s story all over again.
9/10
About the author: Edward Love missed out on Heavy Rain when it was first released on PS3. He’s glad he was able to play it again, and spent 20 hours with the story, unlocking two of the possible endings. (There are a reported 20 in total).
