Saw 2: Konami Miss The Point

I’ll freely admit, I’m a big fan of the Saw movies. The first was a breathtaking piece of low budget filmmaking and although the sequels have dissolved more into a joint exercise in retroactive continuity and gore, there’s a certain addictive charm in seeing where the branching, spiralling story arcs will go next. Zombie Studio’s first game based on the series for publisher Konami wasn’t bad, but the second, entitled Saw II: Flesh and Blood, is released today…

Set between the second and third films (not that it really matters) Flesh and Blood once again picks up on the story of Detective Tapp, or, rather, his son.  The Jigsaw obsessed cop might have been a tenuous enough thread to pick up on for the first Saw game, but pulling his son Michael out of the woodwork (who’s not mentioned in the films) seems like clutching at straws when there’re far more important characters still to be investigated.

Granted, the games aren’t considered canon (at least by the filmmakers) so we weren’t expecting Flesh and Blood to change anything major, but Michael Tapp as a videogame character is about as uninspired as you could imagine, with a hurriedly enforced back story (he’s a corrupt journalist) seemingly enough to get Jigsaw motivated into setting up a whole series of elaborate tasks and dastardly trials to test his resolve and, ultimately, ‘help’ him.

The game actually starts with another player character though, one dying from cancer and also subject to having a key inserted behind his eyeball.  Cue the first of many disappointingly dull and ineffective minigames in which you must cut away at an eye socket with a scapel, something you’d assume would be a stressful event but given the big flashing buttons on the TV behind you and some awful close up graphics the whole event was actually rather mooted.

There’s one on one fighting, too, but for some reason it has completely changed from the last game.  In fact, the ‘combat’ here is unlike any other game I’ve ever played: you meet an enemy, you wait for a quick time event to pop up a button, and you press it.  Whether that’s in defence or whether it’s in an attempt to shove a nail-filled bat into someone’s skull, it’s all done with clunky, embarassingly simple button presses.  Yes, really.

And then there’s the puzzles, which start off with dumb fetch and use tasks usually involving you rooting around in the dark for a key, or a fuse, or a conduit of some kind, and then backtracking to the door that needs opening.  The puzzles aren’t terrible, but they’re not really in keeping with any of the tradional Saw mechanics and feel far more ‘videogame’ than they should do given the wealth of material the subject affords.  The first-person lock-picking in which you guide a nail down down the metallic tunnel of a tumbler, however, is great.

The graphics aren’t bad, either.  Sure, the animation’s lacking and up close there’s a lack of detail that you’d not expect to find in a current gen product, but there’s a real claustrophobia about the locations and the fact that most of the game is in the dark (punctuated by a flashlight) the game does at least attempt to be scary, at least when you’re alone and exploring.  It’s just a shame that the fighting and thinking sections are sub-par when they happen because there’s technical potential here.

My biggest problem however is that Flesh and Blood doesn’t really feel like a Saw experience.  The movies normally concentrate on a few core traps whilst building up the suspense towards a conclusion, here it’s more of a series of smaller events that don’t feel terribly connected and certainly don’t feel particularly weighty or meaningful.   It’s not an awful game, but it’s not one that really fills any void or offers anything new to the genre.

Still, at the end, the hardcore and the dedicated will find out more about Detective Tapp and his death via collectable notes littered around the maps, and indeed his desperate time in the asylum, but whilst Tobin Bell makes regular appearances his voice work seems tired and effortless, and knowing his character’s ultimate demise one movie later removes much of the dread and mystery that such a character should really portray.

Saw 2: Flesh and Blood might be short-lived fun for hack and slash fans, but for Saw fans like myself it misses the point, and we’ll continue to yearn for a true Saw game…