Now available for the X-Box, Playstation 3
Platform: XBox 360
By: Konami
Review:
While just about every major horror franchise has gotten a videogame (NES gave us the legendarily hard Friday the 13th and “4 Player” Nightmare on Elm St. games in the late â80s; Atari had Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre… things they called games), Saw is possibly the only one that would contextually make sense in video game form. Half of the genre games released nowadays start off with someone trapped somewhere without knowing why (like most of the Saw films have), and the series’ locales are the same sort of burnt out warehouses, dungeons, and dilapidated houses that most survival games take place in anyway. In short, it’s no surprise Saw: The Video Game exists, only that it took this long to hit consoles.
Taking place between the first and second films, you play as Detective Tapp (Danny Glover in the first film, but looking/sounding like a much younger guy here thanks to Glover’s refusal to lend his likeness), who Jigsaw apparently took the time to save from his seemingly fatal wounds at the end of the first film. You wake up with a trap on your head, and once you get it off (not very hard), you begin a six to eight hour journey through the halls and rooms of an abandoned insane asylum, avoiding as many traps as you can while pursuing Jigsaw (whose identity is still unknown at this point in the Saw narrative) and occasionally rescuing other characters.
Sort of like Jeff in the third film, Tapp’s journey requires him to help people who have wronged him in some way, such as the reporter who claimed Tapp himself was the Jigsaw killer, or the wife of his late partner Sing, who blames him for her husband’s death. Each of the game’s seven levels has a different character to save (some of whom will be familiar to Saw fans), and the level more or less has you wandering around looking for the key that opens the door to their trap room.
To keep the game from devolving into a series of running around and looking in lockers and desk drawers, Jigsaw has also kidnapped a few dozen random folks and trapped them in the asylum with you. And Tapp, of course, has a key that they all need to escape, which is why they will attack you on sight. The combat is a tad clunky (it takes forever to swing a bat or a pipe – you need to move away from the attacker and wind up your attack before he gets close) but these “minions” are surprisingly sparse; it’s rare you’ll encounter more than four to five per level. Far more hazardous are the frequent tripwire shotgun traps that kill you instantly if you fail to disarm them before walking past. The first time you get your head blown off by one of these things, it’s a nice jolt (and nets you an achievement/trophy), but as the game progresses, they become more frequent and more annoying. It’s a real pain to repeat a lengthy key-finding sequence because you missed a tripwire in the dark right before an automatic save-point. And miss them you will, because the game is very dark and your light sources are hardly blinding.
And then, of course, there are the puzzles. Anyone who has played Bioshock will be familiar with the bulk of them; they are all variations on the “spin things around in order to make a path from one side of the board to the other” type puzzles. There are four different kinds of these puzzles, and they are all randomized throughout the game, so if you’re stuck on a particular timed one, a few restarts will likely net you an easier one. The final traps (where you save someone) usually have unique puzzles to solve, such as guiding a magnetic block to a Jigsaw symbol on a chess-like board, but some of them are simply multiple-board versions of the same puzzles you’ve been solving all along. I wish all of the final traps had unique puzzles, as they are far more fun to solve, but the game as a whole balances the puzzle types nicely; you’ll never feel like you’re doing too many of one type in a row.
It’s just a shame that the game developers didn’t dive into the Saw mythos and come up with a more compelling narrative. Trying to keep it in canon couldn’t have been an easy task, but since most of the characters are new to the game, I fail to see why you have to save them all. It would have been far more interesting to let you choose whether or not they live (by allowing you to retry or simply proceed once they die the first time you fail to save them), especially since none of them stick around anyway. It also could have given the game a longer life in your system – you could try to save everyone, or play it through again with letting them all die, and providing different endings (and achievement/trophy awards) based on your performance. As it is, while there are two endings (you get a left door or right door type choice), you only need to play the game once and then reload the last checkpoint to get the other ending. There is no incentive to play on a harder difficulty, or even for finding the various news clippings and audio tapes scattered throughout the game (nor is there any sort of checklist to let you know if you missed one anyway). Careful gamers will get every achievement on a single play through, and there is no multiplayer component, which is another missed opportunity, considering that at least three of the films have been built around people working together to escape.
Audio and visual presentations are quite good, particularly the audio. Tobin Bell lends his voice as Jigsaw, and ironically, despite being heard primarily through recordings, does not phone in his performance as many actors do when tasked with voicing their character for a tie-in game. The guy playing Tapp is fine, though I wish they had simply put you in the role of another cop on the force, or his brother or something, because his vocal and physical appearance are so unlike Glover’s, it doesn’t really feel like you’re playing his character anyway. The graphics aren’t going to win any awards, but they match the feel and look of the films quite well, particularly in the various bathrooms, which are just as disgusting as their cinematic counterparts. They may have skimped on the narrative, but the devs certainly got the look of the films’ down pat.
As a rental it’s a no-brainer. The story may be slim but it fits into the film series’ timeline without rewriting too much of the history (something each sequel does with the earlier films anyway), the difficulty is just right, and it never gets boring. But as a full priced retail game, it’s a bit short (though still longer than most tie-in games) and lacks any replay value whatsoever, so only the most die-hard Saw fan, who buys each special edition DVD (and then again on Blu-Ray) would want this on their permanent shelf.
Check out GameRevolution for PC Saw Cheats for the video game.
