The original SAW film still remains one of my all time favourite horror films, heck even the 2nd one was pretty good. Everything after that I can’t even remember so it is no surprise to see the franchises popularity start to dwindle. Well Konami has seen fit to release a game, based around the end of the first film which starred Danny Glover as Detective Tapp chasing down Jigsaw. Konami have long been recognised as producing horror game greats like the Silent Hill series, so what has happened here?
Jigsaw has killed your partner and destroyed your life. Now he has trapped you in an abandoned insane asylum that he alone controls. If you can defeat his brutal traps and survive, you may just discover the truth behind what drives this twisted serial killer.
SAW is a third-person perspective, survival horror game based on the SAW film franchise, which has grossed more than $665M worldwide and sold more than 28 million DVDs. The game features many of the deadly mechanical traps seen in the film, as well as terrifying new ones. Players will pit their wits against Jigsaw as they navigate his world in an attempt to evade and escape his gruesome traps, while also struggling against his minions in brutal combat by using weapons found within the environment.
- Traps of Lethal Cunning – Jigsaw has laid out a gauntlet of torturous traps for a handful of innocents. Only you stand between them and the most brutal death imaginable. Think quickly and act! The clock is ticking.
- Choices of Conscience – The player is forced to make difficult moral choices. Who lives and who dies in the game is determined by the player’s choices.
- Mysteries Revealed – Unanswered questions from the films are finally laid to rest. Gamers will discover the origin of Jigsaw and why he devoted his life to games, while also finding out what happened to the characters from the first SAW movie.
- An Ecology of Terror – The asylum in which Jigsaw has trapped you is abandoned, but it is far from empty. It is a living world of horror populated by Jigsaw’s minions and the insane souls they torture… and they have no intention of letting you leave.
SAW is kind of a mishmash of Silent Hill and other horror titles. You play the game in third person perspective right from the beginning. At the start of the game you find yourself inside a room with one of Jigsaw’s devices attached to your head, it will trigger soon so you have to get it off. You do this by rotating the left thumbstick and pressing the right button that shows up on screen. While the game starts off quite well, you soon realise that this “button pressing at the right time” happens far far too often.
The puzzles in the game are very basic and I mean very basic. You will have to turn off steam by turning valves, turn off lights to see clues about where keys are hidden. Solve mechanical puzzles which even a thick o like me managed to do first time along with others that I will mention later. The game also has some combat in it, you pick up various items that are strewn around the levels and then hit the very easy to kill enemies a couple of times and they will die.
You can also lay traps down which enemies can run through and either trigger a shotgun blast or other basic kills. This is a clever idea, except that the enemies are so thick you can place one right in front of their eyes and they will still run over it.
Graphically the game looked quite promising to begin with, it uses the Unreal Engine which has been proven to be great on the PS3 in titles like Batman, but here SAW seems to put little effort in. The textures are ok, but the enviroment, while looking like the film, doesn’t have enough variety, benches, cabinets etc are used over and over again in the game and you will sometimes be wondering if you haven’t just been into the same rooms simply because they all look so similar.
The characters are also poorly drawn and badly animated, facially they look bad too. Your character Detective Tapp also looks nothing like Danny Glover from the films, he even looks 20/30 years younger! The game also suffers from a large amount of screen tearing which just shouldn’t happen when the game doesn’t have much on screen, if it was filled with detail, characters and more then I might be able to understand it, but not here.
The saving grace is probably the sound, the effects are suitably eerie and the voice work from Tobin Bell for Jigsaw is excellent, the rest of the cast do ok too. Music is decent if repetitive when used.
So overall from a fans point of view I can’t see much reason to buy the game other than for those achievement and trophy whores as the game just dishes then out for doing very little. The AI lets the combat down, the puzzles are too simple and basic and there isn’t much of a story behind it. SAW was all about characters and not just the contraptions that Jigsaw used and unfortunately none of that shows here.
| SAW Review | |
|---|---|
| Gameplay |   |
| Poor gameplay and puzzles with very little in the way of variety. AI is awful and just doesn't maintain interest. | |
| Graphics | |
| The environments look good, but are repeated over and over. Characters look poor and the game suffers from screen tearing which shouldn't happen as there is little on screen testing the PS3. | |
| Sound | |
| Music is ok and the general sound effects are possibly the best parts of the game. Voice work is good, especially from Jigsaw. | |
| Longevity |  |
| Little to keep you coming back as the game seems to throw out trophies for just about anything | |
| Overall | |
|---|---|
| Only deep hardened SAW fans will find something to like here, it had potential but the puzzles are poor and let the lack of a decent story let the game down drastically | |
