Well I took a break away from writing
and also a break from Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light. Before
anyone gets worried about my time with 4 Heroes, I just wanted to
take a break from it. I'm not wanting to wear it out, because I'm
still enjoying my time with the game. Now I got Heavy Rain a couple
days ago and have been playing with the PlayStation Move motion
controller (along with the Navigation controller). I gotta say I'm
more impressed with the audio and graphics than I am the gameplay.
You see Quantic Dreams are known for
their dramatic based games. If you're not sure who the company is you
might know another title they released during the PlayStation 2's
generation called Indigo Prophecy for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and the
PC. Both titles heavily share the dramatic environmental experience
and placing the player into the ultimate decision maker role. Every
decision I make for these characters will affect their lives in
different ways. Holding L2 allows me to see what the character I'm
playing as is thinking and I can interact with the character by
selecting the topics floating around that characters head. Depending
on where I'm standing and who is near me will determine whether I
start a conversation with someone or the character just thinks out
loud or mentally. This helps figure out what to do next and any
miscellaneous information I might have missed out on earlier or
recapping. It's a great way to stay on top of things. Providing
insight into all relevant information for my playable character.
One of the most amazing things about
Heavy Rain comes from the graphics. I swear, this game holds up
greatly against titles like Gears of War III, Uncharted 3 and even
Battlefield 3. The character models are incredible to look at, but a
little creepy as well. Unfortunately, the character's realism starts
to fall apart once I took over playing. Characters went from bring so
lifelike and real to robotic and cumbersome to control. Everything
about Heavy Rain encourages exploring everywhere and digging deeper
into the details of the surrounding environment. However, HR makes
things very difficult with the camera controls. I never had full
control over the cameras, the right stick isn't used, leaving me with
using the shoulder buttons to cycle through four different cameras.
Adding to the problem this mechanic uncovers happens to be that I
can't actually check everywhere. I walked up to a cabinet in Ethan
Mars' new house and the game literally turned me all the way around
and forced him to walk into the living room (which is roughly seven
or more steps away from the cabinet by the stairs that I was looking
to get into).
At the end of the day I would recommend
checking out Heavy Rain. I enjoyed the story, the characters (when I
wasn't walking them around places) and atmosphere. At the absolute
very least you need to try out the demos available on the PlayStation
Store.
No comments:
Post a Comment