Fahrenheit (PS2)

I'm guessing you've read the story, and the fact you play three different characters etc, so I won't go in to that.
I'll start with the Graphics. Overall the game could be more nicely polished. The main characters look great, but some of the sub-characters look like demonic beings. The environments however are excellent and the animation excels thanks to motion captured effects.

The gameplay is simple, you'll use your two analogue sticks to participate in Shenmue style QTE's which are great fun, you'll use your triggers to get through scenes which require speed or strength, and finally you'll move your character(s) around to examine things and interact with people.

The actual controls for moving your character are a little sloppy. You kind of walk and run like a robot and the controls get a little confused when the camera changes angle.
This brings me on to the camera! Very annoying in tight spaces, you can swing the camera around, but only about 120 degrees, and it sometimes gets caught up in the environment.

Sound in the game is exceptional, sharp music for the paranormal cutscenes and the voice acting is some of the best I've ever come across. You really feel like your playing in a movie.

I completed the game in about 9 hours, which is pretty short, and could have been a little longer since the end chapters of the game seemed to be a little rushed. But once you complete it you unlock all the chapters and can play from anywhere in the game, this makes for great fun, like annoying other characters, making funny responses to people and making yourself so depressed that you commit suicide!

Everything you do within Fahrenheit affects your emotion meter, drinking water makes you feel better, staring at a photo of your ex-girlfriend makes you feel sad and you lose points.

So all in purchase this game, a fantastic, original game, which although very simple, really makes you feel part of the story.

Graphic/animation: 8.5
Sound: 9.5
Gameplay: 7.8
Lifespan: 8.0
Originality: 9.0

Overall: 8.9

Summary: Purchase this brilliant game, it may be short, but the money you spend on it will be saved by not going out socializing with your friends whist your immersed within it!

The game starts in a café toilet with a random innocent man being violently murdered by another random man (you). You fall into some kind of weird trance and watch yourself kill this guy, not in control of your actions. Some mere puppet. You 'awake' to find the man dead, the knife in your hands. You have to act. Quickly. There's a cop outside eating, and nature's about to call. Hide the body, clean the blood, get rid of the knife. Or don't - it's your call, and although there are limits, you can do or not do a lot of things which alter the game in a significant way. It would be a little pretentious to say no two games would ever be alike, or something like that, but to be honest it's not far from the truth. I won't divulge anything about the central plot except to say that while it's relatively straightforward compared with what you might find in a book or a film, it carries the game well and is pretty interesting.

There are two major elements to the gameplay, which I shall tentatively name freeform and traintrack gameplay. The freeform sections see you exploring the impressively detailed (yet extremely limited) environments, ranging from the café to the murderer's apartment to the police station. Things like this. Here you can interact with characters and the environment using a simple mouse or control pad system where moving the mouse or analogue stick in a direction corresponding to a certain actions, such as sit down, take a swig of wine, hide the mutilated corpse, usual things. The traintrack moments are scripted scenes, such as an escape from the police that, while running along a traintrack so to speak in that they are linear and you don't really have control, you do still have a sense of being involved in the game as there is an interesting mechanic where two sets of lights flash on the screen and you have to quickly press corresponding buttons on your keyboard or push the analogue sticks in the right direction. Get it right and your character will do something good like dodge a car, or you might be able to hear their thoughts during a conversation, get it wrong and you might find yourself flat on your back. There is also a vigorous effort system in the game which plays out in a similar way, you have to tap left and right on keyboard or joystick quickly to perform whatever action you're doing, like for example hanging out of a building. It's all very simple, but it makes the player involved directly in the action, and works pretty well.

You control a few characters throughout the game, Marcus - the murderer, his brother - a priest, and two cops who are trying to find him. This means you are both the cat and the mouse which I found really interesting as you're literally competing with yourself as the plot goes on.

Visually the game is solid at console standards - comparable to some of the best the consoles, the PS2 at least, has to offer - it really is quite good looking, yet sorely lacking at pc standards, it looks like something from 2 years ago - but it still looks fine on all machines. The ps2 version suffers some dubious framerates at times, but it's not enough of an issue to complain about, in no small part due to the fact that the gameplay itself is so slow paced, I suspect. The sound quality is fine, but nothing special, the voice acting is solid and the score is pleasant enough but not particularly memorable.

The developers tried to add an emotional characterisation type thing to the proceedings, but frankly it falls pretty flat on account of the script being so poorly worded, the characters so two dimensional. I often found myself thinking, 'wow, this is terrible!'. There's also a lot of frankly annoying attempts at humour regarding the characters 'not being in a video game' and such. It's cheap and cheesy and doesn't belong in something trying to be as important as it thinks it is. David Cage is also perhaps the most pretentious game developer since Hideo Kojima (except Hideo has earned it, David Cage certainly hasn't). And it really sours the experience at times.

If Fahrenheit was a live action film (with the gameplay removed etc), it would be regarded as a very bad film, by my own personal tastes at least - the plot is relatively straightforward, there are a lot of scenes where I found myself just thinking, ' this is totally pointless non-development of characters', and as a game - in the purest sense of the word - it's not very good either, yet combining the two in the way that they have, it creates something so much more than the sum of its parts, and although it's not without its flaws, it has a lot of charm and is an enjoyable and unique game which has earned the right to be experienced.