Heavy Rain was an interesting story but a weak game.
There were plenty of moments in Heavy Rain where I felt this way. The game starts off unbelievably slow and almost forces you to look at the protagonist's naked butt before you familiarize yourself with the often unresponsive tank controls. I understand that the game is supposed to have pacing but would it have ruined it if they added a "Run" button?
My biggest problems with the game are in the dialogue. First, it carries absolutely no emotion, if this is an interactive story, then there should be all the emotion and atmosphere of a movie to make up for the fact that I'm not doing anything, but there never is. The voice actors are all foreign and while some hide it well their accents are obvious especially with the children who all sound congested. It's distracting! Every time I was being sucked into the story, someone would open their mouth and I'd be kicked right out.
The facial expressions are great and the character models are equally impressive, but it seems like everything else gets riddled with noticeable polygons because of it.
The other thing I didn't like about Heavy Rain was it's inability to explain itself. The FBI agent suffers from some kind of drug addiction, or is it a side-effect of his futuristic 80's-style glasses? We don't know! They never say what it is he suffers from or why! We play through one scene where as the female protagonist, you fight off multiple people in your underwear only to eventually be killed by one of them anyway, but it's all okay because it's a dream! It had nothing to do with they story, it didn't relate to her insomnia, she never mentioned having night terrors, it's just there! The old detective character SPOILER ALERT turns out to be the killer but the game never bothers to explain why he was posing as someone looking for the killer. Is he psychotic trying to get a rise out of his victim's parents? Is he admiring his own work? We don't know!
In the end Heavy Rain is a mildly entertaining story that plays a lot like those GooseBumps books you read when you were a kid. You know? The ones that every 20 pages or so would give you a choice and depending on that choice you would go to a certain page? Remember? But then again...in those books...depending on your choices, you might get a different ending. Heavy Rain can't even provide that! No matter what choices you make it doesn't affect the real ending, and that is SPOILER ALERT, the fat guy is the killer! I thought that maybe depending on what I did, it might affect who was guilty in the end but NO!