Sure, You'd Like to Play a Game
SAW proves that not all licensed games are as bad an idea as one might think.
Published: December 1, 2009
Luckily, future traps weren't nearly as difficult, though the game does often fall back on the same sort of mechanics to try to make traipsing through the asylum "interesting." Everything from ducking weighted booby traps on doors to the aforementioned toilet fishing bits are used and re-used so many times they lose any of their impact. Coupled with a recycling of the same basic trap rooms and mini-game sequences, what starts out as interesting quickly begins to turn stale.
Luckily, just as things are starting to look bleak, another major trap usually crops up -- most of which are taken from the movies or heavily inspired. All this really means, though, is that there's a nice sense of familiarity to things, even if the process by which you'll actually escape (or help someone else do so) isn't going to be as simple as just following the actions of the big screen characters. That the game's story does a decent job of tucking itself back into the cannon of the series (provided you opt for the right ending) just makes it that much more of a treat for fans of the flicks.
There is a rather glaring and persistent problem with SAW though, and it comes down to an old PlayStation 3 weakness: this is an Unreal Engine 3 game, and one in the hands of a developer that hasn't really done a PS3 game before. As a result, everything from texture loading issues to a ridiculously close LOD plane for detailed textures to framerate problems persist throughout the experience (which is really only a few hours long anyway). Though SAW isn't an expressly ugly game (not unless it wants to be), it's clearly the result of a freshman effort on Sony's uber-complex hardware. Fortunately, the graphical issues rarely interfere directly with the gameplay, but hooboy is it distracting at times.
The audio, on the other hand, is far more solid -- which is to say it's creepy. If nothing else, the game manages to build a kind of ever-present sense of dread and fear that's not unlike Konami's other little survival horror series, Silent Hill. Relegated mostly to ambient loops and far-off screams, the simple soundtrack nevertheless does a great job of turning what could have been a clunky and mildly annoying experience into something that is downright fear-inducing when played late at night with the lights off. I definitely jumped on more than one occasion from even simple little enemy appearances and that comes mostly down to the fact that I'm a huge, huuuuuge pussy. But hey, the audio definitely doesn't hurt.
It sounds like a cliché (and it is, I'll fully cop to it), but this is definitely an experience built for fans of the series -- and pretty obviously by fans of the series at that. Almost everyone does the same thing when they see a SAW flick: they play what-if and try to figure out the puzzle, cringe at the sacrifices needed to escape and then weigh whether or not they could bring themselves to do it. SAW the video game simply lets you do that multiple times instead of passively watching, waiting to turn you head at the last second to avoid the inevitable show of excessive gore.
Call it what you will, but this is a series that revels in its own macabre presentation. It's likely that most will have made a decision about the ultra-violent nature of the movies before the game was ever announced and though the video game take on things isn't nearly as realistic or grisly, it's still going to opt for hardcore, decidedly terminal outcomes for nearly everyone involved. So long as you're okay with that and you think you can suss out a means of escape before the traps do you in, you're going to find plenty of fun here. Just don't expect it to be constant fun and (death) games.
