In getting in the spirit of the season, I picked up SAW.  Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews I had been reading and viewing, SAW turned out to be not as bad as I thought it might be.  Developed by Zombie Studios and published by Konami, the game is an adaptation of the SAW film franchise.  This third person survival horror game might not be for everyone, but with loads of puzzles, gore, and some action elements SAW just might be that perfect game to rent given the recent movie release  and Halloween right around the corner, you might enjoy it more than you think, if you can get past some imperfections.

SAW is first and foremost a survival horror game.  You control David Tapp, a detective that is  trapped in Jigsaws asylum filled with boobie traps. SAW starts off with your character coming to consciousness and struggling to release himself from one of Jigsaws traps. You will soon find that the ultimate objective of SAW is escaping with your life. Tapp must traverse the asylum by completing a series of puzzles, fights, and general exploration. Gathering information as to why your character is there by means of searching dead bodies, exploring dirty toilets filled with syringes, Tapp is constantly on the lookout for new clues, weapons,  health, or Jigsaw notes.  For the most part the story is propelled forward by completing puzzles.  These puzzles are the core gameplay element and can be a little repetitive at times, but there are so many variations of the puzzles that you will only notice a few times throughout the game.  Enough to make you question the ambition of the developers but not enough to ruin the game, especially if this was a rental.  The experience is for the most part linear, with Jigsaw pushing the player through his funhouse into bottleneck parts of the game that must be completed, but there are quite a few paths you can take in your game to avoid danger or find goods.  The game is not completely puzzles though.  Mixed in throughout SAW are very poorly done fighting sequences.  Here is where you can really make a case for SAW being a horrible game.  Your character is so slow and clunky that any head to head fight regardless of the weapon you may be holding is almost certain death.  The enemy AI moves far more fluidly than your character and you will more than likely resort to the parry mini game that will instantly kill an enemy if you correctly press a series of buttons.  One of the cooler features in the game, besides from the gore and tension of your environment are the traps.  Placed around the asylum, Tapp will uncover the ability to use these to his advantage and I thought it a nice addition to add in the mix. All of these intermittent parts of the game lead up to a finale at the end of each level.  Jigsaw is holding persons from Tapp’s past and your objective is to complete the challenges to release this person.  The game gets very creative in the ways that these NPC’s are killed off if Tapp fails.  I failed plenty just to see the scenes. The rewards for failing did seem to outweigh the rewards for success and thats pretty odd, but it was interesting nonetheless.

The graphics of SAW are not the best I have ever seen.  They walk the line of mediocrity on their own merits.  The world of SAW is a dark and gritty place, which doesn’t really showcase anything groundbreaking in terms of graphics.  Yet, the environment is how you would imagine it… Dirty.  There is a ton of violence in SAW as you would expect.  The game handles most of the modeling fairly well , but there are times when you are gonna see some glitches in the action.  A little bit of clipping, characters walking through doors that sort of thing, makes the visual experience in SAW a little substandard.  With Jigsaw playing a huge part in the game, it was only right to get Tobin Bell to voice the part.  His acting lends a great hand to the SAW experience it gives the game authenticity.  There is a nice mix in of sounds to create a tense experience in SAW I have to say this was one of the better aspects of the game.

The bottom line on SAW is that it comes out at a good time and a bad time.  With Halloween just around the bend, it’s probably worth a rental just for the tone and setting of the game.  However, with all the great titles that have recently been released and are coming soon it’s gonna be hard to justify a purchase of SAW. The game lacks the necessary polish that would make that justification possible.  There are too many parts where the gameplay is repetitive, and overall mediocre.  In small doses though SAW is a fun experience.