With a game like Heavy Rain, reviews can become much less concrete. Questions arise such as "Are you a 'storyline gamer' or a 'gameplay gamer'?" Suddenly, gamers are sorted into strange and new categories that never existed before, changing the meaning of a review. Because of this, I feel that a brief introduction is necessary to provide a bit of context to my opinion.

First of all, I play all different kinds of genres but ultimately, I would be considered a 'storyline gamer'. I love games for their epic storylines and powerful characters. Therefore, I've been desperately awaiting Heavy Rain since it seemed to me the epitome of story-based games.

Now, for those of you worried about spoilers, I simply want to leave you with this brief statement. The game is good but I wouldn't recommend paying 60 dollars for it. Wait until the price lowers if you have to buy it, otherwise, a rental will be more than sufficient. For the rest of you, I will try very hard to leave you with no spoilers to the game but since story and gameplay are integrated extremely well, there are possible hints to the ending.

Your first playthrough will probably leave you thinking, that was a great experience and I can't wait to go through it again and see how my changes will change the ending. I know that's how I felt. Sure the storyline has it's problems but it is exciting and you truly feel like you play a large part in how the story unfolds. The true power behind it, however, is that the possibilities feel endless.

Then you start your second playthrough. Right from the beginning, you start to realize that the game isn't good at providing the gamer true freedom, the game is good at providing the gamer an illusion of true freedom. In reality, your options are extremely limited. For example, I'll use a situation NOT actually in the game to provide an explanation of the game. You are in a plane that is crashing and you have to escape. You obviously feel a sense of urgency to escape the plane before it hits. First, you see a parachute but it seems to be locked in place by a rope. You also see a fire extinguisher behind a glass screen. You bust open the glass case and use a glass shard to start cutting at the rope. Suddenly, fire erupts onto an engine out the window and the ground seems to be hurtling towards you at extremely fast speeds. You saw at the rope even faster when finally it cuts through. You grab the parachute and jump out of the plane right at the last second, surviving. Let's play through that again, this time without doing anything. You sit in the plane as it's crashing and nothing happens. You realize that there is no timer but in fact, the actions you perform are really triggers. The fire on the engine doesn't erupt until you start cutting at the rope. You could go and make a sandwich and come back half an hour later and be in the exact same position. Another possible situation that the game throws at you is that you are timed. However, if you don't "succeed", the game will give a predetermined solution usually involving the character surviving just fine.

Another problem is that although the game was advertised as allowing your characters to die and having the story continue, this honestly isn't really true. Only two of the four playable characters can even be killed meaning the other two, no matter how many times they get shot, blown up, beat up or whatever, will never die. Also, the two that can die really don't have much effect until the ending of the game.

All of this could even be forgivable except for the fact that there are literally hundreds of choices you have to make throughout the game that honestly have very little if any effect at all on your game. It's extremely disappointing to make a change in your game that you feel will have a large effect, only to have the game course-correct your decision to put you back on track.

Ultimately, Heavy Rain will give you a very enjoyable experience for about 10 hours until you finish your first playthrough but will then leave you disappointed when you learn how fake the experience really is. I would recommend Heavy Rain for a rental and nothing more.