The Suffering: Ties That Bind

Platforms: PS2, Xbox
Release Date: 2005-09-26
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★☆☆
Though this sequel is very similar to its predecessor, some balancing and plot problems prevent it from being completely successful.

Official site at Surreal Software.

The Suffering: Ties That Bind is the sequel to the 2004 title The Suffering by Surreal Software. If you played the first game you’ll know what to expect from Ties That Bind; the two games are so technically similar that the sequel could almost be a really long expansion pack for the first game.

Ties That Bind picks up right where the original Suffering leaves off, with Torque in a boat on his way away from Carnate island. But when he arrives in Baltimore he is surprised to find that some crazy para-military organization is after him and that the horrific monsters from Carnate have followed him to the mainland. Like the first game, Ties That Bind uses supernatural horror to comment on real life problems. In addition to bloodthirsty monsters with knives for forearms, Torque is surrounded by crime in the ghetto, drugs, rape, and corruption. In fact, the monsters themselves seem to be the most explicit manifestation of society’s problems. The developers clearly want you to understand that some aspects of real life are far worse than creatures who are out to kill you, and this idea adds a lot of depth to the story.

As in the first Suffering, Ties That Bind is all about shooting. The game continues to follow FPS rules: your health bar will regenerate up to a certain amount, you can only hold two weapons at a time, walking over weapons refills your ammo, etc. Most of the game is spent running from place to place and terminating everything you see. The morality system from the first game also returns, so you’ll have the opportunity to decide whether to kill or help the innocent people that you meet along the way. Your choices will eventually affect how the game ends.

Like the first game, Ties That Bind also has strong, well-developed characters. Most of the cast is new, though a few personalities from the previous game do make an appearance. Torque also runs into a couple of long-dead Baltimore murders who serve as this game’s version of the undead chorus, but the killers are a little less interesting than their predecessors. Still, the dialog is good, and while the story has some serious plot holes, it’s mostly pretty well realized.

When I reviewed the original Suffering, my main complaints with the game were that it was not balanced well and that it was buggy. Unfortunately, I have almost exactly the same complaints about Ties That Bind.

Levels in Ties That Bind are all laid out in a predictable manner: you progress forward for a while, killing enemies that pop out at you. After a little while you’ll reach an open area, where you’ll have to kill a particularly strong enemy or a stream of enemies before you can progress. While this sort of level design is in keeping with the first Suffering game, the enemy mega-battles occur too frequently and become too difficult towards the end of the game. When you are progressing linearly through the levels, the difficulty of the game feels correct and lots of fun, but when you get to these kill-everything-in-an-area-to-progress sections, suddenly the difficulty spikes and the game becomes very frustrating. This sort of design seems like it might be a necessary hack to maintain challenge in a game that allows you to save at any time, but I found it really detrimental to the experience, especially in the last third of the game. Some of the fights took me twenty or thirty tries to complete, which is unreasonable and unfun.

Part of the problem is that the game sometimes requires you to switch into monster mode to complete a section. As in the first game, Torque can turn into a devastating monster when he fills a special meter up, and as this monster he can do lots of damage to enemies. In fact, some enemies can only be defeated by changing into a monster. However, the only way to fill up the monster meter is to kill guys, so very often the game will put you in a situation where mass carnage is required just to ensure that you have a full monster meter to kill one otherwise invincible enemy. Since there is no way for the game designers to guarantee that you will enter the section with your meter full, they have to throw an infinite number of enemies of you just to enable a particular challenge. This would be ok with me if they also balanced the infinite stream of guys with an infinite supply of health, but since they do not do this I found this design paradigm annoying. The problem is aggravated by the fact that you automatically collect health items and use them up even if your health is almost full.

The other issue related to play balancing is that the enemies that can fire projectiles are extremely overpowered. The Arsonists in particular do much more damage than they should (they can usually kill you in a hit or two, since their attacks set you on fire). It got to the point where I would often have no hope of winning a battle if an Arsonist spawned in, where as any other enemy could was easily dispatched.

The other issue I had with Ties that Bind is that I ran into a number of bugs. The game actually crashed for me quite a number of times: once at the main menu, several times when restarting at a check point, and once or twice in the middle of play. Though crashes are serious, they didn’t bother me too much because I never lost any work. If you play this game, my advice is to save often.

Though there were things about The Suffering: Ties that Bind that really bugged me, there were a lot of cool things as well. The guns are all fun to wield (though it’s still pretty much impossible to tell which guns are particularly powerful or particularly weak), the control scheme is solid, and the monster design is top notch. The environments are again really well done (I particularly liked Torque’s apartment), and the morality system is effective without being complex. The graphics are pretty awesome (particularly the lighting effects and in-game animation sequences), and the characters are interesting. As in the first game, the events Torque goes through are something of a metaphor for his own internal search for truth. As he descends into the depths of Baltimore he is simultaneously learning more and more about who he is and what kind of person he was before he went to prison. While the game never quite reaches the Silent Hill 2’s level in terms of presenting physical places as a manifestation of the protagonist’s psyche, the attempt is still pretty effective.

One thing I really liked about Ties that Bind is that the end of the game mostly takes place in a prison. The prison section from was easily the first game’s strongest moment, and it was so good that subsequent levels felt lacking in comparison. In contrast, the finishes the game up inside a well-realized prison, and is able to capture some of the feel of the first game in as the story builds to a climax.

All things considered, Ties that Bind is a pretty good successor to The Suffering. While it is mechanically very similar to the first game, the new levels, story, and characters are strong enough to make the game stand out on its own. Though I had some problems with the way encounters were designed, most of the rest of the game (the parts where you progress forward through the environment) were a whole lot of fun. The team at Surreal is still the best horror game team outside of Japan as far as I am concerned. If you enjoyed the first game and want more, or if you are looking for a shooter with a solid narrative, you could do a lot worse than Ties that Bind.

Cold Fear

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, PC
Release Date: 2005-03-15
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ☆☆☆☆
A pretty but ultimately shallow and frustrating attempt at action-oriented horror.

I’m not sure what to say about Cold Fear exactly. It’s got all the components of a good horror game, excellent graphics, and some genuinely creepy environments, and yet I can’t think of a single moment in the duration of the game that I felt like I was having fun. The game is a chore, from start to finish; it’s like a lifeless husk of a game that, by rights should be really fun, but for some reason I found it awful instead.

Cold Fear is a survival horror game that takes place first on a whaling ship and then later on an oil rig. It’s not the first horror game to take place in these locales: Carrier and Deep Fear covered this territory many years earlier. In fact, there are a lot of parallels between Cold Fear and Carrier: both take place on a ship, both involve research into some alien organism that turns people into zombies, both star a blonde super-soldier character, and both include invisible enemies. I also suspect that both games were intended to get the jump on the next Resident Evil release; Carrier’s developers were probably trying to get their game to market before the vastly superior Resident Evil Code Veronica came out, and Cold Fear looks like it was designed to benefit from Resident Evil 4 pre-release mania. Granted, Carrier is even more of an atrocity than Cold Fear is, but neither game is very good.

Cold Fear is a survival horror game that clearly falls in with games like Resident Evil 4 and The Suffering because it pushes action elements and gunplay to the fore. The player has a number of powerful firearms at his disposal, the protagonist is never portrayed as vulnerable, and the game is full of exploding heads and other gore. As an action game, it’s not half-bad: the gunplay is fine (apart from the aiming, which I’ll get to in a moment), the weapons work as advertised, and the control scheme is pretty good. And there are plenty of horror elements here as well. The environment design in particular uses light and shadow really well, and some of the rooms on the ship are really quite creepy. It’s also worth noting that the graphics in Cold Fear are pretty phenomenal; I played the PS2 version, and I was quite impressed with many of the scenes, especially the outdoor storm effects and atmospherics. Darkworks clearly has very talented engineering and art teams.

The problem with Cold Fear is that none of that stuff matters because very quickly flaws in the game design shatter any belief you might have been suspending. The game loses all of its ability to be scary (and later, fun) to a few key game design decisions that, in combination, prove to be deadly sources of frustration. I ranted about some of the problems with Cold Fear a few months back, and I was surprised by the number of people who seemed to have played the game without any error. I later revised my assessment of the failures of this game and concluded that fundamentally, Cold Fear doesn’t give the player enough information. I’ve thought about this a bit more (I had to think about something while slogging through the remainder of the game), and I’ve come up with a short list of the design decisions in Cold Fear that ruined the game for me.

  • No map. I spent hours wandering around the ship and oil rig because I often had no clue where the game was asking me to go.
  • Save point system. You can’t save at will in Cold Fear, you have to wait until the game prompts you with the option. Anticipating the next save prompt is difficult; sometimes you’ll be asked to save about two minutes after the last save, and other times you’ll progress for hours before reaching another save spot. Of course, there are no checkpoints either, so if you die you have no choice but to reload the save.
  • Unpredictable ammo and health rationing. Some enemies drop ammo, others do not. Enemy bodies fade away after a few seconds, so even if they had ammo to give you, you will miss it if you don’t get to them quickly enough. Since you can’t store items for later use, this makes pacing yourself very difficult.
  • Extremely difficult aiming system. It seems that this game was built for a mouse rather than an analog stick. Aiming in Cold Fear is harder than in any other game I’ve played, especially when you are on the boat. It does get a lot easier when you reach the oil rig, but there’s still no aim assistance and the control is twitchy enough to make the requisite head shots harder than they should be.

There are other problems, but these four are the robot lions that combine to form the Voltron of failure in this game. Now, each of these problems is not a deal-breaker alone, but together they make for a terrible play experience. The really killer problem is the save system, because unlike most other games, you can’t anticipate save locations or manage your character’s health and ammo before you save. Case in point: when you reach the end boss, you are forced to fight him with whatever ammo and health you happened to have at the last save; you can’t go back, there are no health items in the boss area, and, if you are like me and got there with less than 50% of your normal life, the boss fight is frustratingly difficult (as an aside, it’s also a terribly designed boss fight for other reasons–ugh!).

So you run around looking for some room you can’t find because there is no map, and along the way you encounter a lot of zombies, which you have a tough time killing thanks to the terrible aiming system. When you finally get to where you are supposed to go, your health and ammo are depleted. The game asks if you’d like to save, and you have to hesitate. On the one hand, you just played for an hour and don’t want to do all that crap again. But on the other hand, if you save now in your weakened state, the next section could be close to impossible. There’s no indication if the room you will end up in post-save is an item-rich treasure trove or a huge boss fight, and since you can’t carry items around for later use, you pretty much have no option but to press forward with however little resources you may have.

This may sound like I’m picking at nits, but seriously, this happens all the time in this game. Some people seem to play through it without every encountering these issues, but I suspect that they’re simply lucky enough to figure out where to go before they run out of resources (I’m also told that aiming with the mouse actually works). The moment-to-moment game play in Cold Fear isn’t very challenging (other than the aiming, which just feels broken), but there were several times that I almost gave up on the game due to frustration; it doesn’t matter how good a player you are, the game simply will not allow you to kill zombies if you run out of ammo.

The other elements of the game, such as the story, character development, and enemy design, are all a mixed bag. The zombie design is very nice (I really like the glowing Morlock eyes), but the exocel monsters (basically the bugs from Extermination) are quite lame. The story is very well written, and the characters developed though a series of diary entries and other files that you find are pretty good. But the plot itself is quite cliche, and the characters that matter (like the protagonist) are completely underdeveloped. It’s pretty much generic macho guy shooting zombies so he can save generic hottie that he has generically fallen for after exchanging 30 seconds of dialog. All of these aspects of the game would have been more than sufficient if the core game play wasn’t so broken; as it is, they just add to the intense mediocrity of this title.

In summary, Cold Fear, like Call of Cthulhu and a few others, has all the right elements for a good horror game and yet fails to glue them together with good game play. The graphics are great, the environments are creepy, and the story isn’t half-bad. It’s just that playing the damn thing isn’t fun because a couple of key decisions suck you right out of the experience and destroy any sense of enjoyment. The game isn’t a complete failure, and I’ve heard that some people manage to unwittingly avoid some of the worst sources for frustration, but there’s really no way that I can recommend Cold Fear.

Haunting Ground

Also known as: Demento
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2005-05-10
Regions: USA Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★★☆☆
Clock Tower 3 run-and-hide mechanics applied to a much more cohesive game, though the routine still gets old after a while.

Haunting Ground is an old-school survival horror game dressed in new-school technology. It’s got all the adventure-meets-horror goodness that Resident Evil taught you to love: large, gothic buildings to explore, items to collect, high-quality graphics, and plenty of item and object puzzles. At the same time, Haunting Ground takes the road less travelled by pairing the protagonist with another character (Hewie the dog), removing your ability to fight, and relying on recurring enemies rather than zombies or other creatures for its antagonists. It looks very nice and has a lot of good features, but there are also some fundamental issues with the game that prevent it from reaching its potential.

Haunting Ground stars Fiona, a young woman who finds herself trapped in a large castle. She can’t remember exactly how she got there, but she quickly realizes that it is in her best interests to leave as fast as possible. Her hosts don’t seem too keen on her leaving, and in fact they seem to be absolutely insane. Fiona’s only companion is Hewie the dog, who is able to attack enemies and help Fiona solve puzzles. As she progresses through the castle, Fiona is constantly pursued by the castle’s residents, and each seem to have a different reason for wanting her dead. Her journey eventually takes her all over the huge castle grounds, and on the way she discovers that the castle’s long strange history of alchemy and torture is somehow related to her own past.

If you played Clock Tower 3, you have a good idea of what to expect. Haunting Ground is basically a sequel to that game, and though the plots of these two games do not overlap, the actual game mechanics and design are extremely similar. Like Alyssa in Clock Tower, Fiona spends spends most of her time exploring a large area in a mini mini skirt while being pursued by various bloodthirsty psychos. As in Clock Tower, Fiona can hide in certain areas, but if she uses an area too much her pursuer may discover her. And finally, Fiona can become scared and eventually go into a panic, and which point the controls become difficult and the graphics become stark and grainy. Generally speaking, Haunting Ground is Clock Tower 3 with a different protagonist, different enemies, a longer, more cohesive story, and slightly modified game mechanics.

That’s not to say that Haunting Ground is a carbon copy of Clock Tower 3. The cheesy bow-and-arrow boss fights have been removed, as have the ghostly side quests and the time traveling plot. The introduction of Hewie gives the game considerably more depth when it comes to dealing with enemies: Hewie can be trained to attack enemies so that you have a chance to escape, and he can also be directed to find hidden items in rooms. The puzzles this time around are much better than they were in Clock Tower 3, though the absurdity and unlikeliness many of them will remind you of Resident Evil. Also, the art style is much less cartoonish, especially the way lighting is used to create stark contrasts throughout the castle. One of the points I made in my Clock Tower 3 review was that the game is too simple to support more than about five hours of play; Haunting Ground has much more to offer, and while it’s still pretty simple, the game mechanics are just barely able to sustain the 12 hours or so the game requires.

There’s also a lot of additions to the formula this time around. The areas that Fiona explores are gigantic, and they are all connected together without any inter-room loading whatsoever. Fiona has a few more moves at her disposal, including the ability to kick and ram objects and a number of fun-but-ineffectual combat items. Since the castle she is trapped in is full of alchemic machines, Finoa can actually create new items by playing an infuriatingly difficult mini game. The boss fights are pretty good too, as they provide you with multiple ways to defeat each enemy. The enemies that pursue Fiona are all quite unique, and while some of them are clearly scarier than others, they are all well designed.

Despite these various improvements, Haunting Ground still has some fundamental problems. My main complaint with Clock Tower 3–that the constant appearance of enemies disrupts your ability to explore and progress–is still applicable. Once you figure out the pattern to escape each enemy, the game loses its ability to scare you and becomes something of a chore: every few minutes you’ll have to stop whatever you are doing and run around for a while until you lose your pursuer. While this is fun for a while, by the end of the game you just want to find the items you need to solve the next puzzle and be done with it. The problem is compounded by a lack of obvious hiding spots: though there are a few spots that are specially designed for hiding, they are few and far between. It’s sometimes possible to create your own hiding spot by just crouching somewhere out of the way, but often the enemy will just magically know where you are, making the hiding mechanic somewhat useless.

What it boils down to is repetition. There’s a point right in the middle of the game where the antagonists appear so often that you can barely do anything besides run back through all the rooms you’ve already visited over and over. Though there are a few genuinely startling moments, the second half of the game becomes so formulaic that any ability the game might have had to scare you is lost.

There are a couple of other things that bugged me about Haunting Ground. The first is the attempt to impart cheap sex appeal to the main character. While Fiona is a well-designed and interesting character, the developers have gone out of their way to put her in compromising situations to please a male audience. Her outfits are all skimpy and revealing, her chest has an exaggerated bounce to it when she runs, and the cut scenes never miss an opportunity to show you her legs. It’s not blatantly exploitive the way DOA: Extreme Beach Volleyball is, but it cheapens the overall experience because it is pointless. Increasing the sexual appeal of a character is a strong card for a developer to play, and while I’m all for developers exercising this sort of control over their work, I’d much rather see it used to deepen the dramatic value of the game. In the case of Haunting Ground, that potential is squandered on cheap titillation, which not only clashes with the rest of the content’s serious style, it distracts from the game’s attempts to scare you.

As with most games, Haunting Ground also suffers from a couple of horribly-constructed sections. Though there are only a few of these frustration machines, they are enough to put a dent in my overall impression of the title. The most egregious offender is the very last section of the game, which relies on rules and mechanics that the player has never seen before, and unfairly punishes the player. I found this area in particular to be extremely annoying.

Fortunately, all is not lost. If you can put up with the annoyance of having to run and hide every few minutes, the exploratory parts of Haunting Ground are a pretty good reason to keep playing. Fiona visits a lot of different places, and while they all sort of look the same, the construction of the maps and the way each area is presented is usually pretty good. And thought the puzzles may seem a little trite, most of them are genuinely fun.

Haunting Ground isn’t a perfect game, but it’s a pretty nice take on traditional survival horror mechanics. If you are looking for something to fill the void left by the recent dearth in old-school horror games, Haunting Ground may be for you.

Official web site: http://www.capcom.co.jp/demento/index.html

Siren 2

Also known as: Forbidden Siren 2
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2006-02-09
Regions: Japan Europe

Juggernaut

Platforms: PSX
Release Date: 1999-09-30
Regions: USA Japan

Summary by forums user Innominatus:

Briefly summarized: the premise is very unique, but it’s very flawed in execution. Your girlfriend Sarah is possessed by an evil force, and you must enter her mind and fight the evil in order to save her. Gameplay is very simple- you travel (in first person) through pre-rendered screens that are connected by short FMV’s [though I’ve never played it, it’s similar to what I’ve heard about D]. You can only move in preset directions depending on your location, and pick up/manipulate items. Without going into too much depth or spoiling anything, there’s basically an overworld that you must go through (the first half of the game), and 8 elseworlds, which are 8 stories where you’ll travel to a different place, seemingly unconnected to the main plot. These vary, but are all generally quite fun to play through- in one, you’ll find yourself in a forest with murdered bodies all around, all with their eyes removed. In another, you’re in a futuristic prison, where strange experiments are taking place and you must determine the cause behind it.

Resident Evil Outbreak 2

Also known as: Biohazard Outbreak: File 2
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2005-05-26
Regions: USA Japan

Information from The MagicBox:

Capcom has released new details on its latest online action adventure game Biohazard Outbreak File 2 (Resident Evil Outbreak File 2). The story takes place in other parts of the Racoon city, where the 8 characters from the first game continue their journey to escape.

The first scenario takes place around a zoo, zombies appear during an Elephant show, and the zoo is now deserted. The elephant and other animals were infected by the deadly virus and rampaging in the zoo.

Biohazard Outbreak File 2 is scheduled for a Fall 2004 release in Japan, the game will correspond to the PS2 Network Adapter and Broadband Unit.