Forum Overview :: Deleted Posts :: The Suffering

[quote name="curst"]I'm really not going to tell you anything Gamespot can't. Their 7.6 rating strikes me as right on the money. It's well above average but nothing that you'll remember a couple years down the road. One thing I like about it is that despite being a horror game (well, sort of - frankly it's more of an action title than anything) you no longer play the role of some hapless fag who can't aim a gun for shit, can't swing a wooden plank more than once every five seconds, and can't do 180 turns in less than four seconds. To compare Torque of this game to Heather of Silent Hill 3, Torque is a little bit faster, about fifty times as strong, and whereas you have to beat SH3 to give Heather the innate power to shoot weak-ass laser beams with her eyes, Torque can almost immediately transform into a nice monstrous-ass monster who shreds enemies with ease. The only problem I have with the basic gameplay, which honestly could draw comparisons to something like FAKK 2 (you'll have to rely on melee combat at times and ranged weapons at others, but either way it's paced about as quickly as most FPS games), is that there really are not any strategies involved aside from... do you want to use a ranged or melee weapons against this particular monster? As far as puzzles go, gone are the days of trying to figure out the sequence of piano notes to play, or which noose to pull. This game has puzzles in the sense that FAKK 2 does: pull this statue out of the doorway far enough that you can go in the security station to open the door, then hurry back and shove the statue through the door before it closes again so that you can enter the room behind the door... stuff like that. This disappoints me, but only a little. One cool thing that I didn't expect at all: you will encounter many situations where you have to make a good-or-evil choice, and it slowly but surely alters the story of what your backstory is and how the ending will turn out. It's a lot like the Blade Runner adventure game. A lot of people tend to complain about the profanity, but I have to ask them: did they never watch Oz? Or any random prison chick flick? Etc? The voice acting doesn't suck and the dialogue is just fine given the setting. Of all the things to be anal about, I'd say that "complaining about cursing in a game set in a prison" is pretty much at the bottom of the list. You're probably thinking that there's no horror to be had in this game as a result of all this, but that's not quite true. It doesn't really have the disturbing feeling of "WTF?!" that pervades the Silent Hill games, and I don't think it's shock-and-BOO! moments are as good as Fatal Frame's. But two things in its favor: first, the monster design is kind of nifty. The monsters are all representations of various forms of execution - one has lots of syringes protruding from it and it'll throw them at you, and should you be hit your vision will blur momentarily. The first monster, I believe, is a humanoid that seems to have blades for forearms and shins, and it runs around like a spider making pretty decent metal-scraping-on-wall noises that for some reason always work to put me on edge. Secondly, there's some moments that - okay, maybe they're not "SH1 school switches to alternate world" quality but they are still interesting. One early example ***SPOILER!***: <font color="#000000">you'll be accompanied by a guard and head near a room with an electric chair. You'll hear someone screaming in torment. The guard will order you to stay as he investigates. When he enters the room you'll see electricity fry him momentarily, and he drops dead. You can then run in and there seems to be nothing there. Now, go in the security room adjacent to this (you have to run around a bit to find it), and you'll see two security monitors. One looks into the electric chair room, and the other is aimed right at you staring at the sec. monitors for whatever reason. Well, use the monitors - the first monitor will show a man in the electric chair being fried, even though you were just looking in that room through a window and there was no one there. Then when you hit X to look in the second monitor, you'll see yourself, but you'll also see a bulky human shambling towards you from behind, radiating electricity sort of like Raiden from Mortal Kombat. If you sit there for a while, he'll grab for you but disappear. If you exit the monitors in a panic, there's no one there. </font>***END SPOILER*** Again, that's nothing extraordinary, but it hardly sucks either, and the game has plenty of moments like that. Anyway, The Suffering is definitely more of an action game than survival-horror. But it was pretty good - easily worth a rental, and after a price drop to $20 I'll probably buy it. One thing it has unquestionably succeeded in doing is make me sick and tired of the idea that survival-horror games HAVE to give you control of a clumsy moron in order to be creepy. Why not just make me someone who can handle themselves decently, but then make the enemies more of a challenge? Your game will still be tough but I won't be frustrated with shitty controls. Win-win! [/quote]