Waited 3 years for this bad boy, and after playing it I can easily say it was worth the wait.
I played Heavy Rain when it first came out back in February and I must admit I was worried. I was worried that the game would have a terrible plot to it. About 2 week before Heavy Rain arrived I just had a feeling that the story would be very poorly written, and that the killer would be easy to identify or that he would be announced early on into the game. Luckily my worries were wrong and Heavy Rain has an absolutely fantastic story to it. The killer does not become known until the end and the game does a great job at keeping you in suspense.
Can we please get one thing out of the way my dear little review viewer? This game is NOT a movie. Hell the entire games longest cut scene is about 3 mins long. The game does a great job at leaning in and out of cut scenes. One minute your watching a cut scene and then the next your controlling your character. I never played a game that did this so smoothly, sometimes I would forget to pick the controller back up because I thought I was still watching a cut scene. So naturally with this the gameplay moves along at a nice pace. When you walk around your character you do not use the traditional joy stick, instead you move with the R2 button, which has some time to get use to. However as odd as it may be to walk around by holding a button it makes the game work, it makes the game feel more realistic and everything just pretty much works in this game. The controls are designed around how the game is suppose to be played, it's suppose to feel like a movie and it's absolutely immersive. When your in combat you do a sequence of button tapping which is just a brilliant way to handle this game, and it only adds to the immersive feel.
The game is visually stunning, I mean it just looks amazing and this also adds to the immersiveness. The game uses the voice actors actual faces/bodies to make the characters in Heavy Rain. So naturally using real people to animate a character makes the game 10x more realistic then just randomly making a character from scratch. Lip syncing is a down fall though. Heavy Rain does a terrible job at matching the words the characters say with the movement of their lips. Luckily though Heavy Rain does such a great job with everything else that you do not even notice these things after a while. The game just naturally grows on you and you will have a hard time putting it down.
I feel the only really big downfall to Heavy Rain is some of the voice acting. Obviously to make a game immersive you cannot just have great visuals and gameplay, you also need great voice acting which this game has a hard time at. Heavy Rain was not some big production like Uncharted 2 so do not expect top notch voice acting. The only bad voice acting I came across was from the kids in the game and maybe 1 or 2 other characters.
All in all Heavy Rain is a great game. It's all about the story you go through with the 4 main characters. The makers of Heavy Rain made another game called Indigo Prophecy which was great in terms of gameplay, but the story fell apart, Heavy Rain however does not. The game keeps you hook all the way till the end and, sadly it does not have much replay value unless one of the 4 main characters die somewhere in the game (yes they can die) in that case, you will most likely replay Heavy Rain. If you beat the game with all characters alive you will have no purpose to replay it, however the game is a good 10 hours long and the story alone makes the game worth wild to play because this is one gaming experience you cannot afford to miss out on.