Not bad. It’s pretty okay.
So, great by movie port standards. Not bad by the rest. Buggy, mediocre combat, overly-simplistic puzzles, but the atmosphere and acting are great.
Do I have to write more?
I guess so.
Saw is its own story within the series, taking on the story of Detective Tapp, one of Jigsaw’s early hunters. His game is held in an asylum, filled with people trying to kill him to retrieve a key planted in his body. He’s put face to face with past victims and forced to save them, similar enough to Saw III really. His test is, ultimately, one of his ability to let go of his obsession, but that means rather than others experiencing their own games in the standard way, Tapp has to save them. Through puzzles. Mostly recycled.
Alright, come to think of it, the good parts of the game really aren’t the game itself, they’re the movie-themed aspects and setting. Storywise, this one fits with the first three splendidly. Thank god, because IV was “meh” and V sucked out loud. Unfortunately, the game itself tends toward repetition and bugs. Tension is created rather artificially. Combat is initially annoying as the blocking mechanism is terrible, and the combat itself is unresponsive, but it quickly becomes a good block and instant kill for every enemy you run into, or an easy run into a tripwire. So while most enemies are a non-threat, the game resorts to a lot of instant kills via tripwire, and that results in an annoying amount of returns to checkpoints which are just a little too sparse, but that’s typical for survival horror, which I’m pretty sure this qualifies as. Theoretically limited weapons and utility items, though really most enemies drop a weapon and the traps you can build are never, ever needed. The one time they’d be useful, they have virtually no effect on the enemy, so there’s no real reason to bother with them.
Aside from that annoyance, the tension comes purely from the story and environment itself. The dilapidated asylum is a great setting. Dark, and the player’s light sources are of limited utility. There’s lots of broken doors, corpses, busted steam pipes, and notes left over from the asylum’s last days in the 1980s. Players even bust down a few cracked walls, and the game does create an excellent feeling of survival at any cost (though quickly they’ll yawn at reaching into ANOTHER acid barrel or syringe filled toilet). Unfortunately some of the walls are bugged and will take three or four minutes to bust if players don’t hit at just the right spot. Oops.
A lot of the environment is distracted from by the object pop-in, too. Konami clearly didn’t put its best programmers on this, as whole televisions will come into appearance suddenly. Texture streaming is one thing, and pop-in of distant items isn’t a rare thing. But these are low-object environments in close quarters. A TV shouldn’t suddenly show up when I’m four feet away, and the other five are already there.
The puzzles are, mostly, “been there, done that.” Generally the traps are things you fix by handling puzzles you’ve already done. Gear placements, pipe twistings, and…another form of pipe twisting. In one particularly bad one, it’s a memory game. You know, flip two cards, do they match? Oh, well try again! If they’d have gone with puzzles more based on the workings of the machines, or even more twisting turning controller interaction, it would have worked better. Instead it just felt very disconnected, minus the first person you rescue, which was an interesting enough puzzle. But since Saw isn’t about puzzles, it’s about sacrificing to survive…well, it doesn’t work as well as it should.
There’s also an odd level of censorship. Of all the games I expected to not shy away from blood, this would be the one I expect to revel in it. Instead, it’s very, very muted, particularly head trauma. I know that’s a big thing, but the game is m-rated anyway. Why shy away? And the enemies are too damn recycled. You see a few models far too often, and they all have the same few trap types on them when you fight. It’s never particularly gory when they go off. You do get an exploding head or two thanks to shotgun collars, but the way it’s done is…well, minimal. Particularly odd when a nailbat to the face does NOTHING to someone, at least visibly.
Yet the desire to finish the story was enough to push me forward through the game, which did run on a little longer than it should have, particularly when it got to key hunts and combo lock code searches, along with too much backtracking and replay due to instant-kill tripwires and door traps. Jigsaw sure owns a lot of shotguns. And has a lot of time on his hands. And for someone who wants people to survive, if damaged horribly, there’s a lot of instant killing that doesn’t come from breaking the rules of the game.
The more I think about it, the more “eh” I feel about the game elements. Mediocre models, nice texture work, great environments, lame traps, lame enemies, lame combat, mostly lame puzzles. But the story pushed me forward, seeing Detective Tapp’s influence on the world and the game he’s caught in. Maybe they should have stuck with that, because the game they made doesn’t play like one would want for Saw. It watches like one, at least, but it should have been a comic or movie, rather than a game.
Saw gets 2 out of 5 stars. Weak when it comes to the gameplay, but for fans of the series, the series will be pushed forward by the story, which fits quite nicely between the first two films. Otherwise, it’s a half-hearted effort, and probably not worth the rental.
