Great game that ends too abruptly and sloppyshly. Kinda like the word sloppyshly.
User Rating: 8.6 | Fahrenheit (French) PC
David Cage was upset about how little developers had untapped the potential of videogame narratives and decided to embark on a quest to fix that problem. Fahrenheit delivers, most of the time. Fahrenheit starts out with Lucas Kane eating at a diner, when he suddenly takes a knife and goes to the restroom. He doesn't take his pants off, sits down on the toilet and...carves a weird symbol into his forearms. As a man enters the restroom to urinate a bit Lucas exits the stall with knife in hand, walks towards the man with ankward steps, like a puppet on a string and stabs him three times in the chest. SNAP back to reality. Lucas comes to his senses and discovers what he's done. From this point on it's up to YOU to decide. Do you panic and run away as fast as you can or do you urinate a bit yourself, clean yourself up, pay your bill and act normal to not raise any suspicion? This is one of the features of Fahrenheit. And though you're not free to do whatever you want and every choice doesn't actually have a consequence, you do have choices and these choices can affect other scenes in the story. Sometimes scenes are more complex sometimes less. Sometimes I'm surprised they thought about a certain detail. Sometimes I'm a bit dissapointed they didn't. You move Lucas as usual by moving the left thumbstick. But mostly everything else about the control system is not usual. You perform actions by standing near the object you wish to interact with and move the right thumbstick in a movement corresponding with what the character does on screen. For instance if you want to mop the floor you move it up and back to its neutral position. The animation plays out as you move the stick, analog animations. You can play around with this if you want to. Perhaps it's just me but I think it's fun to open a door a bit, then shut it, then open, shut, open, shut, just because I can, or perhaps because I'm a psycho. Makes the character appear like one anyway. Other actions that are part of the game consists of either QTE-scenes where you need to push the sticks in the directions shown on screen. Doing this allows Quantic Dream to make scripted scenes playable, kinda. Some of these scenes are really neato. And then there's the TracknFielding where you mash the shoulderbuttons till they or your fingers break. This too is an attempt to simulate the characters action. When they struggle with a physical task, so must you is the idea. A tip is to use your thumbs instead of your index fingers. Much easier. This all would work pretty good if it weren't for one thing. The camera. In indoor scenes the camera is fixed in certain cinematic angles. You can switch between different angles with the push of a button, but the problem is...let's take an example: You're in a straight hallway. The camera is behind you. You walk forwards by pushing the stick up. All of a sudden the camera changes to being in front of you. You continue to push up and the character continues to walk forward. Stop, push up again and the character walks back the way he came. This confuses you and makes the character run into a couple of walls. Can become a bit ankward, especially during timebased sequences. The best part about this game is without a doubt the narrative and the characters. The game is populated by deep, believable and likeable personalities. During the first parts of the game it's really focused more on the characters and their development than the actual story. The story itself isn't all that spectacular really, it's the way it is told. Using splitscreen cameras, motion captured animations, great voiceacting, dialog, cinematic camerangles and different people's point of view. In the beginning you of course want to know what's going on. But the explanation is a bit silly, though expected and accaptable I guess. What really is silly though is the ending. Not at all as fleshed out as the rest of the game it's sloppy, rushed and makes little sense, if at all. I wouldn't have been surprised had a naked flying clone of Micheal Jackson appeared. That's how bizarre it is.This is the only thing I can really complain about. (not the lack of MJ) And it's a shame cause it could've been so much better. To David Cage I ask: WTF?, why? and how can a stiff be stiff? To David Cage I give: my money and a *****slap.
