The Suffering is a good action based horror game, but has some small defects that keep it from greatness.
Other then that just a little more polishing on the general mechanics of the game so everything runs a little smother and it would be great. The first person and third person perspectives work well and you can play though the game in either very easily. The games enemies have a pretty good AI although very rarely they’ll get stuck behind an open door or something. Some of the characters you work with in the game such as the guards could have a better AI, particularly the last one you work with near the end of the game. At one point I put out the fire in the tunnel and he didn’t realize I had and was staying inside the tunnel talking about dying from the smoke.
Graphically the game is in a few different ballparks. The game was released in March of 2004, so for the standards of the time it was a good graphical game, but I think even by the standards 2 years ago they weren’t perfect. The game looks good from a distance but if you get up close to a few things they don’t look as good. There are a few environment elements that are done in 2D that could have been better placed to hide that from sticking out and could have used a little better design. The character models all could use a few more pixels.
The game has good blood effects and if battle your character will become drenched in blood from killing and from being hurt. The more killings or damage the more blood will show up. The blood slowly goes away a little after, which could have looked a little better, but the effect is very cool and that small nitpick of a drawback isn’t even a price to pay for having it in the game. The enemies look great; I’d say a little better then the humans in the game. They are very innovative and make sense to the surrounding story and nature of the world your in. They have unique attacks as well and all of them are very cool, particularly when the injection needle monster jumps on you and you have to try to fight him off from stabbing you with a needle. The game has a good variety of weapons, such as guns, knifes, axes, and a ton of explosives like grenades and TNT.
I personally enjoyed the games sounds from gunshots to music, which was intense, scary, and creepy. The musical score is definitely very well done and fits well in a horror game. The monsters sounds and noises are good too. They sound creepy, violent, and realistic to the each monster. The quality of the voice acting is inconsistent, but it depends on which character your talking about. I didn’t like the family at times and I thought they did a better job on other lines. Overall they didn’t sell me on the mental frustration the main character was going though, reliving his horrible crime. The guards were either all right or needed a better actor.
Your character doesn’t talk the whole game, which is kind of annoying, but since it is a horror game and he has the demons inside I can see it working on that as well. I really liked the black inmate on death row at the very beginning of the game and I think he had a great performance and other assorted characters were good too.
The biggest problem was there were some lines that could have been read better and perhaps it’s more the game’s director’s fault and not the people playing them I don’t know. I do know that there really aren’t any cringe moments where you’re thinking did they even pay these people. So, I’m pretty much just critiquing very minor stuff from the game. My favorite voice performance was by the gas chamber character, which I can see a lot of people disagreeing with me on that because I could see someone thinking it was kind of corny, but I did really enjoy all his speaking lines.
The game is about average in length although it does seem a little short and it doesn’t tell you how much time you played it for, and usually that does mean it is a little shorter then they wanted it to be. The game does have some replay value. Being an action driven game instead of a story type the game will be still interesting to replay if you know the story and your not the type who likes to relive a story driven game. There are multiple endings based on gameplay style. There are multiple difficulty settings, and unlock able content such as an original first stage of the game which was cut out.
Overall, this could have been a great game with more polish on the gameplay, which this game does have a bug in it, were at a point you need to trigger a cut scene and it won’t happen sometimes and you can’t continue with out it, so that is a bit annoying, and I had to replay a bit after it didn’t trigger for me on a save so make sure you have some backup saves when playing. The story of the game is good but not great and for a horror game the story is usually very important, but it has a good one and is a more action then horror and it is definitely not a survival style horror because weapons and supplies are easy to get and come in a large abundance. I liked this game and hope the next game will be more polished and will live up to the licenses full potential.