Giant Bomb Review
34 CommentsSAW Review
3- PS3
- X360
by Ryan Davis on
Saw captures the rusty, sadistic aesthetic of the films well enough, though like the series, the longer it goes on, the less interesting it is.
The game takes place between the first two Saw movies, putting you in the role of Detective Tapp, the man who obsessively pursued Jigsaw in the first film. Here he's been kidnapped and stuck deep inside a dilapidated insane asylum that Jigsaw has converted into giant, elaborate testing ground, with the stated purpose of trying to save Tapp from his own obsession with trying to catch Jigsaw. In order to save himself, Tapp has to first save a series of other Jigsaw victims, many of whom are somehow intertwined with Tapp's obsession. With an impossible number of conveniently placed TV sets, that creepy little doll, and his brutally monotone voice, Jigsaw guides you through the labyrinthine asylum, subjecting you to all manner of grotesquery as you try and save each victim, such as plunging your hand into toilets filled with dirty needles and barrels of acid to retrieve keys.
While the puzzles and the atmosphere are the primary focus in Saw, there is still some one-on-one combat, which is easily one of the game's least compelling components. In theory, though, it's pitch-perfect for Saw. The asylum is filled with other desperate, violent people whose only chance for escape lies in a key that Jigsaw has surgically implanted inside Tapp's body. As if that's not bad enough, it's not long before Tapp is fitted with a collar mounted with shotgun shells that are pointed at his head. There are others in the asylum with the same collars, and if they get too close for too long, both collars will go off, unless one of them dies first.
The bigger picture problem with Saw, though, is that it's got a handful of clever ideas, but it exhausts most of them in the first hour or so, and you spend the rest of the game playing the same puzzles and performing the same tasks over and over. The puzzles get a little tougher, but beyond that, they never really change. The game tries to keep the tension up between puzzles by livening up your path with narrow balance beams set over serrated pits and random tripwires attached to shotguns, the latter of which can be a particular and sudden source of frustration. These threats mostly just force you to move through the game at a more methodical pace, and the more time you spend in this dirty, scary, extremely contrived place full of psychopaths and deadly machinations, the more accustomed you become to its particular rhythms, and the less unnerving it is.
The game puts on a pretty good facade, affecting many of Saw's stylistic flares. There's lots of jarring camera shake, motion blur, and patchy focus effects, and the soundtrack is all industrial clangs and squeals, but in the end it's all window-dressing for a game that has more in common with Professor Layton than Condemned.
