Last week, like several million other gamers around the world, I had the somewhat jarring pleasure of playing God of War III and Heavy Rain back-to-back. So I thought I'd try my hand at a double review with some cursory commenteering thrown in. Just because my recent posts have been nowhere near confused and scattershot enough. So prepare to be forever trapped in an infinite vortex of unnecessary adjectives, pungent similes and phallic punnery! HAHAHAHA!!!
Ahem. So, God of War III and Heavy Rain. Unlikely bedfellows, I'm sure you'll agree (although after three games I'm fairly confident that Kratos could dominate pretty much anything in the bedroom). God of War III is a slickly-produced action/adventure game set in a highly revised version of Greek mythology, giving players the chance to brutalise all manner of fabled beasts and deities whilst carving their way up Mount Olympus in a gore-soaked journey of merciless revenge. It's also the product of five years of refining a combat system and a fight-puzzle-fight game structure through the previous two GoW titles, not to mention the countless influences it snatches from other games (most notably Japanese hack 'n' slashers like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden). The story of God of War, therefore, is one of brilliant refinement, of taking features that have existed for a while and implementing them in the most seamless, epic way possible. It's what has made this the definitive action series for the Western audience, a crown that's thoroughly deserved.
And GoW III is the purest refinement yet. The combat system, characterised by vengeful protagonist Kratos' wildly swinging chain blades (now called the Blades of Exile), is familiar and comforting like an old quilt, with just enough new hotness thrown in to keep things spicy. The controls are intuitive enough that the player can think tactically about how to react to different situations without having to battle with buttons or spasming thumbs. The balance of the game is similarly well-honed, with chase sequences, platforming and simple puzzles effectively breaking up the slaughter sections.
Some recurring problems inherited from the previous games still occasionally frustrate. I can't count the number of times Kratos awkwardly stumbled off the side of a cliff because of spazzy camera angles and deceiving depth perception. There are also a few too many (ie: more than one) 'arena' sections which pad out gameplay by tirelessly throwing waves of minotaurs at Kratos' bald pate before allowing him to continue.
But all criticisms fade into insignificance during the game's most impressive sequences, the sheer scale of which is genuinely staggering. The game's opening salvo (Kratos scaling Olympus on the back of monolithic Titan Gaia) might hit your eyes like a bag full of sex hammers, but just wait until you experience a later boss fight, in which your enemy's fingernail is the size of a detached house. And despite the occasional platforming hiccups, the team at Sony Santa Monica has done some great work with the in-game camera, which zooms out to paint epic watercolours and back in again to capture all the gory details without ever sacrificing player control. I heard someone say that the game is aggressively directed, and in the case of the game's highlights this is a spot-on description. And by aggressive I don't just mean point-of-view beatings and unflinching decapitation sequences, rather that the camera feels more actively involved in the proceedings than ever before.
While GoW III represents the refinement of a genre to its purest molten core, Heavy Rain is an attempt by French developer Quantic Dream to breathe life into a whole new genre of gaming: the 'interactive drama'. Yes, I too was ready to sniff at this somewhat baroque Gallic description, but I genuinely can't think of a better one. It's basically a CG movie in which the player has control over the outcome of scenes through pressing (or failing to press) buttons at relevant times. Although that makes it sound much more boring than it is. It's an interesting game. An important game, even, and one which will hopefully spark a new wave of mature gaming experiences with which adults can connect. It's just that it's not a very good game.
The story, which follows four unconnected characters (you play them all in various scenes) who are all trying to track down a child-snatching serial killer, is involving if generic (think Zodiac meets Se7en with Saw groping itself in the undergrowth nearby). Dialogue veers wildly from convincing to laughable, depending on how well the largely French cast can manage a US accent and how well the game's director David Cage deals with North American dialect and mannerisms, both of which seem to vary from scene to scene. It's disappointing that a game that has compromised interactivity in order to present itself as a thriller to sit proudly alongside cinema's best offerings has settled for a story and dialogue that fails to break out of the 'good, for a game' category.
However, what the game does excellently is build atmosphere and tension within individual scenes. Quantic Dream has built on lessons learned on its last game Fahrenheit to craft some of the most memorable moments in videogame history. Scenes in which the characters are imperilled are rendered all the more jittery with the knowledge that any of the four characters can die and the story rolls on without them, often towards a more tragic ending. The controls effectively mirror the stress levels of the characters, and tricky actions (picking locks, disarming bad dudes etc) translate into holding down tendon-stretching button combinations that are refreshingly representative.
But on almost all other fronts, the control system leaves a rancid aftertaste. The developers' bizarre decision to control character movement by holding down the right trigger and steering them like a goddamned Panzer tank makes the simplest actions a chore and often leaves the player strafing face-first up and down a wall like an abandoned Asperger's patient. The over-reliance on responding to on-screen button prompts, as is so often the case, means that your eyes are scanning the screen for the next prompt to pop up rather than enjoying the action that's going on as a result of your button presses. Likewise puzzles, which regularly occur under an aneurysm-inducing time limit, too often degenerate into frantically wandering around an environment looking for a prompt to pop up rather than actually coming to a logical conclusion.
No matter how dubious the execution, however, the fact remains that it is Heavy Rain rather than GoW III that will be looked upon in ten years as a landmark release. While Kratos disembowelling his way through the Olympian pantheon trumps Heavy Rain on virtually all counts in terms of sheer fun, Quantic Dream has made a more ambitious game. In fact, playing them back-to-back was a curiously satisfying experience; a 48-hour marathon during which my thirst for new virtual experiences and my sickening bloodlust were both sated. As long as the games industry has the capacity to continue offering polished gems like God of War alongside ambitious experiments like Heavy Rain, I reckon gamers have got a lot to look forward to.
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