A fair way into the game, with someone tied up to a chair I’m encouraged to swing the controller to slap my victim across their jaw, I do so with a strange eagerness, and when asked to repeat I start getting my body involved; I want to hurt this guy!

The fights are particularly involving, movements on the controller direct your character left and right out of the way of punches and incoming pipes and other melee attacks. The same goes for punches your character throws, everything is mapped to either a movement of the right stick or buttons for quicker interactions.

What makes them so involving is that even though performing the indicated action will result in a successful dodge or a swift punch, missing the button press could result in you getting a swift kick to the nether regions or falling over a chair, neither of which will mean you have failed, the fight just took a different turn. It can make for an incredibly tense 5 minutes as you really feel on the edge to keep your character in the fight.

Other than in a few other scenes where I think the QTE’s worked, I was overly disappointed by their use in lots of cases. Pretentious times in scenes where you change a baby’s nappy or make a character dance aren’t interesting and seem to be there to make a statement rather than create involving gameplay or further the story along. Other times they opted to show you something in a cutscene instead of allowing you to play, such as when playing as a woman and tying up a man after knocking him out, would have made for a teriffically tense and sadistic bit of gameplay, but the designers opted to let me dance earlier instead.

Sometimes having more detailed choices to your actions would have been more appropriate than just a prompt to press X without knowing what it would do, you can tell the developer wanted to make these choices simple to stop people from pondering over the choice but it felt like a step backward from Fahrenheit in some cases, the developers previous game that employed a similar gameplay style where you could choose from multiple options in most scenarios.

In gaming forums I’ve been quick to defend the game when people called it an interative movie, but after playing it through to the end I think it was occasionally an apt description.Without enough choice of your interaction within certain scenes, it never felt like I was helping the game along, more hindering it by not standing in the right place for the icons to pop up telling my what to do next.

I would love to see Quantic Dream employ their gameplay style to an adventure game where you could explore the environments more. The detectives part felt like it was a step towards this, but only being able to analyse the evidence in a seperate scene again felt like you were slowly being “tutted” at for not finding the clues before the scene could shuffle you along through the story.Comparisons to an interactive movie aren’t necessarily bad, but you have to at least live up to the standards of the media you are trying to imitate, voice acting was terrible in places, especially amongst the chilren. Quantic Dream being based in France have seemingly (at least to my untrained ear) made use of local actors, but most deliver their lines with broken accents and pauses for emphasis in all the wrong places and it really breaks the immersion, as it would in any movie.

That’s without considering some really poor facial models, again on the children in particular, I had absolutely no attachment to the son character as he looked like a tennis ball with a cut in it for a mouth that someone had stretched skin around. Surely finding a single American child actor in France can’t be that difficult, or even an English boy from across the channel putting on the accent would have fared better.

If they didn't get the look right the game could have fallen flat, luckily it looks stunning, life like texturing and a superb lighting style give Heavy Rain a real modern day film noir feel with a coat of smoke and dirt that you can almost scrape off your tv screen. The engine does suffer in some places, tearing and pop-up are rife throughout the larger action and outdoor scenes but a lot of it can go ignored. Loading screens are used to show off their incredibly life-like facial texturing and they're a wonder unto themselves.

The overall story is quite weak with a fluffy story line that weaves too many unnecessary scenes together with badly written characters and some poorly directed sequences make it feel like a made for tv movie. A scene where a character dies after the player "fails"; ends incredibly abruptly, with no emotion or tension drawn from the otherwise traumatic scene.

The gameplay mechanics that QD have honed through Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain seem like they could now be applied to other games without re-writing the rule book, the few minor issues mentioned above and the niggles with the engine could even be overlooked or ironed out in the next iteration, while a writer more used to movies could apply a tighter more intriguing story. Something like The Bourne series would fit well, the action scenes would translate beautifully into a game like Heavy Rain especially as the comparisons for the fights in Heavy Rain are close to the Bourne movies style.

At the end of my first play through I really enjoyed the game, albeit with one of the “bad” endings. QD still have just a short way to go to perfect their vision of the interactive blockbuster game-movie…..type thing, but they have proved that there is definitely something there worth pushing for, and the next game they make in this vein could really show what they are made of.