Retro Gaming 10’s- Heavy Rain: (2010)

One of the most underrated video games to have emerged from the PS3 era of the late 2000’s-early 2010’s was Sony’s Heavy Rain title from 2010. Heavy Rain was a detective based interactive film action-adventure game developed by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Heavy Rain was a game gamers from the early 2010’s are somewhat polarized about mainly because despite how popular it was the voice acting was not great. Aside from the voice acting almost everything about Heavy Rain was impressive including its visual presentation, quick time event gameplay along with the multiple endings the game had. Heavy Rain had approximately seventeen endings and four main characters who tried to solve the mystery of the Origami Killer. It should be noted that Heavy Rain had four main characters Ethan Mars, Scott Shelby, Norman Jayden and Madison Paige each with their own background which made the game interesting.

Despite, the clunky controls and the boringness of the game towards the beginning the twists and turns that took place throughout Heavy Rain made up for some of the quality issues that the game had.Also, players were able to connect emotionally with some of the characters as the game progressed. Heavy Rain shined on the PS3 during a time period where third part games like Call of Duty Black Ops was mainstream and when the Gran Turismo series was still a huge attraction for Sony’s consoles. Heavy Rain had managed to reach at least 5.3 million copies in worldwide sales across multiple platforms despite its minor flaws in relation to pacing and voice acting. When it comes down to mystery detective based action-adventure games Heavy Rain was far better than Murdered: Soul Suspect (2014) and was almost as good if not better than L.A. Noire (2011). Its a bit shocking to some that Heavy Rain never developed into an actual video game series or got a sequel for that matter. But than again the mystery detective action-adventure genre slowly began to decline after the early 2010’s. It should also be noted that fictional action-adventure games started to become more popular on PlayStation consoles as the decade progressed with titles like Marvel’s Spider Man (2018); opposed to non-fictional action-adventure titles. While Heavy Rain had some minor issues gameplay & story wise it still holds up nicely to this day over a decade later.