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Review: Heavy Rain & Beyond: Two Souls Collection

Another day, another remastered re-release. This time around it’s a Quantic Break bundle, packaging the early-era PS3 classic Heavy Rain alongside the late-era Beyond: Two Souls.

This release is pretty niche; those that are interested in either title have had plenty of opportunity to play them for years now. Moreso, Beyond: Two Souls has been available on PS4 for the last three months. Still, let’s see how the game-slash-movie titles have aged.

Heavy Rain

Surprisingly, we don’t have an original review for Heavy Rain. More astonishingly, this reviewer hasn’t played the game until now, though I’m quite familiar with the “Press X to Jason!” meme.

All that considered, Heavy Rain is awful. Aged. Best left in the past.

An atrocious control scheme is the first of the game’s problems, involving a strange grouping of buttons simply to make your character walk around the screen. This is worse yet when you consider most of the game has you doing little to nothing at all. While Heavy Rain‘s got a great story, the portions that make it a game distract and get in the way.

Sony gave us our review code with a series of dot points detailing how Heavy Rain has been improved. While it’s hard to deny the game looks great — albeit, firmly rooted in uncanny valley — that’s not enough to warrant a new release. This serves no real purpose other than to show how Quantic Dream has refined its development process. Comparing this to Beyond: Two Souls, it’s easy to see how David Cage and company have improved movement, interactivity, storytelling and gamification.

If you haven’t played Heavy Rain by this point, it’s probably best not to. Gaming and gamers have moved on.

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Beyond: Two Souls

Despite being leaps and bounds better than Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls still remains a divisive game. Even without the distractions that plague Heavy Rain, you’ll still walk away from this newer release applauding it for being unlike other games or questioning why it’s even classed as one.

Starring Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, this Choose Your Own Adventure-like, interactive video-game-slash-movie can be hit-and-miss. Cage originally presented the story of Jodie (Page) in a linear, yet non-linear way; you don’t get to choose the order in which snippets of her life are presented, and they’re constantly moving back and forth in time. You begin right near the game’s end and jump between scenes with Jodie as a small child, an awkward teenager or a troubled adult.

A new addition to this re-release provides the opportunity to play through the story chronologically instead. I’d encourage returning players to try the chronological option, whilst newcomers should play as Cage first presented Beyond.

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[Read our full PS4 review of Beyond: Two Souls here.]

Heavy Rain & Beyond: Two Souls Collection was reviewed using a promotional code on PS4, as provided by the publisher.

 

Review: Heavy Rain & Beyond: Two Souls Collection
4 out of 10

The good

  • Um…
  • Beyond: Two Souls fares much better than Heavy Rain, but you can buy that separately.

The bad

  • Heavy Rain is dated as hell.
  • This is a cash-in. Plain and simple.

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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.