PS3 owners reporting Heavy Rain issues

Update: Sony Europe has told Eurogamer: "We are aware of the reported issue and are investigating the situation." More when we hear more.

Original story: Heavy Rain is having a few teething issues on launch day by the looks of it, with Sony Europe apologising for a problem with redeemable codes and the US Sony forum awash with reports of freezing, loss of sound and other issues.

According to a 28-page thread on the official forum (thanks Kotaku), early buyers are experiencing a number of issues including corrupted auto-saves and stuttering.

Sony community dev manager "Sam_Protagonist" posted saying that the issues were "being looked into", and asked anybody experiencing problems to detail their PS3 setup and provide any other pertinent information to help the developers "establish any common factors".

"One word of advice we've had already is to avoid switching off your PlayStation while the game is in black screen as this may be affecting your save game," Sam_Protagonist wrote.

"There have been a few reports of incidents where game saves have taken longer than would normally be expected - and with a black screen present it may leave the assumption that the game has crashed. In these circumstances we recommend you wait at least five minutes before rebooting - while it's highly unlikely a save will take this long, it's better to be safe than sorry.

"While incidents of problems with the game are very low we're working to ensure that everyone gets the Heavy Rain experience they expect. As soon as there is any further information we'll update further."

Meanwhile, in Europe, product manager Alex Pavey offered apologies on the European PlayStation blog for an issue affecting buyers of the special edition version.

"I'm sorry to say that there has been a last-minute technical delay with the official soundtrack, meaning that if you redeem your voucher code before 4th March, you will be able to download Chronicle 1 and the Dynamic Theme, but not the official soundtrack," Pavey wrote.

"If you redeem your Special Edition voucher after 4th March, you will receive all three pieces of content as normal - and if you can stand to wait a week to start downloading additional content, that will be the easiest approach.

"If you have already redeemed your voucher code and have not received the official soundtrack, please contact your local customer service teams who will be able to help you."

Whoops. Heavy Rain is out today and reviewed elsewhere on the site. Our review code worked perfectly well and didn't crash at all, for the record, so something's clearly up. We've asked Sony for more information as soon as it's available.