Snippets from the Heavy Rain review:
Scene to scene, few games match Heavy Rain's compulsive pull.
A fine line is trodden between realism - aptly conjured with the finest quality of light seen this generation - and filmic cliche, only occasionally, and thus effectively, giving in to the fantasy that plagued so much of Fahrenheit.
Heavy Rain is a point-and-click adventure with a masssive verb sheet; new actions are as much a twist as the narrative reveals they prompt.
The controls don't always make sense. Vigorously flailing the Sixaxis to bully and onscreen figure into brushing his teeth is far from simulation.
In a game founded primarily on choosing a path, the inability to know exactly what you're doing is literally and figuratively short-sighted.
The general skeleton of the story cannot truly be changed, cheapening every event in the process.
And the closing paragraph:
"How far are you willing to go to save someone you love?" asks the kidnapper. We'd put a similar question to Cage: how far are you willing to go for interactive drama? Scene by scene, Heavy Rain proves itself a worthy advocate, ripe with potential and mystery. But the bigger it grows and the more it threatens to collide and conflict, the broader the strokes become. Are you a champion of freedom and interaction or choreographed thrills? Do you make games or films? Like the scenarios put nefore our desperate father, the decisions are not easy, and the consequences often unsatisfying. But watching them unfold? Quite unlike anything else.
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