User Rating: 7.5 | Clock Tower 3 PS2
I'll go by section, so bear with me. I find the game play actually really fun, unlike most people it seems. My main gripe is with the controls and camera angles, which can be said for basically most of Capcom’s survival horror games. At times, especially when being chased, the camera angles tend to shift, and block your view of the enemy, only allowing you to hear them behind you. It adds for an odd sense of realism, and movie quality, but the frequency of the shifts tend to be a bit too much. The holy water does give you quite a bit of an advantage, IMHO a bit more then it should, but hey, at least I’m not being smashed into the ground. The Panic meter is an interesting addition, but I find it way to easy to alleviate it, but I guess it is made up for in the frequency she seems to get freaked out, which (mostly in later levels) happens a lot. Another thing that tends to be a little off are the Boss Battles. Unlike most games, where you can run, dodge, and shoot quickly, you lack these benefits, making for a very slow and repetitive battle, because if you get hit you WILL feel it. This may be a challenge to some, or chore to others, I find it somewhere in between. The graphics in the game are good, but not the best by far. When thinking of these things I directly focus my attention on the game Fatal Frame, yes these games are different, but also very similar in most respects, and not just in their genre. So when I compare the Graphics in Fatal Frame to those in Clock Tower 3, it's a really close call. During game play the graphics are about the same, if not having Fatal Frame nudging out Clock Tower because the ghosts in Clock Tower 3 are honestly horrid looking, and not in the spooky way. When it comes to the movies, which can be found rather often, I find Clock Tower 3 nudging Fatal Frame out. The sound is good, it has nice music, but in the first Scene/act/whatever you want to call it the music tends to repeat, and really get on your nerves. It's good about the first 10 times, but quickly becomes a thing where you wander if they could just let you listen to it a few times. Now, the true value of this game can be found in its stories. The Stories are interesting, intriguing, and anyone with at least some sort of love of mysteries will be found glued to this game. It makes you want to know more about it, more about the victims in this game, a sense of wanting some other games might not bring out in you. Overall the game is good, a nice refreshing experience from other games lately, but I can't really compare it to them because the genre's are so different. Easily my favorite of the clock tower series, and is about par with fatal frame in overall quality.
