Siren Blood Curse

I love how it's written like that without anything to separate the Siren name from the secondary title sort of. This is a sort of semi-remake of the original (some things are the same but it's got a lot of new stuff too) but split into episodes that you can play in any order. Get the whole pack for 30 euros or pay 40 euros in total after realizing after the first one that this game rocks like hell. I'm not even going to start about the file sizes (around 700-1000mb per episode, 12 in all) because fast connections are so common all over the world currently so it shouldn't be a problem at all. Besides, it's fun to download a real full game, especially if you haven't done so before. The only thing I wonder about is why release them as episodes and why do you have to download each episode pack in each chapter separately? If you release episodic content then why not release more later like a TV series instead of everything at the same time?

The graphics are up to date for the PS3 although at times the shadows are a bit too defined. The transition from light to dark is very rough and if you thought Doom 3 had too many dark areas this one will be like walking in a pitch black room at times. Areas that are important for gameplay are mostly well lit though. I know the overall visual experience here is something that not everyone might like and at times it is a bit too unclear especially with your huge character in front of the screen blocking most of it. It works well enough in outside areas but the game has lots and lots of small corridors and houses that really don't come to justice because you can't see enough. Obviously you can switch to 1st person perspective but a game like this is meant to be played from 3rd person view because of the different characters you play. 1st person mode doesn't even support strafing whilst moving forward/backward and turning is slow. It's meant for short usage to explore corners and such anyway. The slightly artificial darkness is there to add to the horror experience though and it makes you feel even less in control of the situation.

Speaking of controls, I heard they were bad but this is classic survival horror and it works just fine for it. You have to base your game's difficulty on how the player character moves and it works well here except for a few parts with flying enemies that shoot at you. I've heard of the sniper zombies in the original version that people hated but gladly they have been removed from this version. You have to make the difficulty fair to the player and can't have enemies that require you to turn around at fast speeds without a quick "turn 180" action on the player character like in Resident Evil 4.

I have to say I played the game through on Easy mode. I thought I'd focus on the story more and not worry about fighting because in horror games I'm more interested in the adventure aspect than than killing anything and I was a bit afraid the fighting might be an annoyance at places like other survival horror games have proven with limited amounts of ammo and so on. When you get to choose your difficulty I would list them as "I prefer story" and "I prefer action" because choosing Easy makes you think you're a wuss. Or then simply Normal and Hard but that wouldn't be accurate really. It's a tough call because you don't want to make players then think, if they chose "I prefer action" that they're losing out on some story elements which wouldn't be the case obviously.

The story is fairly good but it reminds me of Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill. Resident Evil 4 came after the original Siren in 2005 (original Siren in 2003). The Silent Hill references are obvious because a few of the developers that were working on the first Silent Hill worked on Forbidden Siren. It's interesting to see the story for different perspectives because you get to play so many different characters. It gives a sort of variety while still keeping the story intact. There are some risks to an approach like this, for example people might not feel as emotionally attached to the characters when there are too many of them. It's fine in Blood Curse though and seeing your characters as zombies when playing with other characters is cool. The chronological order of things is a bit weird because you're not entirely sure why you have to run through a certain area again and why your friend isn't a zombie anymore whilst they clearly were one in the previous chapter. Speaking of chapters the episode system works like a charm. It has the classic "Previously on Siren" types of flashbacks in the beginning of each episode and the "Next time on Siren" clips at the end. It felt really cool even though I know Alone In The Dark 4 announced the feature on their game earlier but I never got around to playing it.

I have to say part of the scare factor of Blood Curse is lost because it's so spread out over little areas and you know you just have to get to the end of the map basically. Obviously the easy difficulty setting also does its fair share of calming things down. Luckily the game doesn't rely on sudden scares which I think are a really cheap way of creating horror. Only in the very beginning do you see a zombie burst through a wall but nothing compared to some bullshit moments in Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill. I raise my hat to games that make you play on the edge of your seat because of the atmosphere. There's enough variety in things you have to do but there aren't enough maps really. You find yourself running through the same areas a lot. Not too much but its right there on the line, if a few of the levels were repeated just one more time I would've been very disappointed.

More about the gameplay, it's actually interesting because the game is a mix of stealth action (Metal Gear Solid, Thief,..) and horror, making it stand out from the survival horror camp. The enemies, for some reason, don't react to your light but who cares, it's WAY too dark when you put it off even though a subtle high definition range type of system is in play, in which your sight adapts to darker areas after a while when moving indoors for example. Lighter areas grow and you see more.

The inventory is a bit weird. I only realized in episode 11 that you can actually see how many bullets you have left. Why doesn't it show it in the main screen? I know they're trying to reduce HUD information though (you can't see your health either, although on easy mode you can take quite a lot of hits so it doesn't matter really). In that episode I also figured out that a Shibito Brain (a type of enemy) doesn't always look the same. Finding them is a pain, even with sight-jacking which I'll get into later. The game should tell you more distinctly how to track it down or what it looks like, perhaps with a glow around the enemy or them talking very distinctly (fast and high for example) when you're in sight-jack mode.

There are way too many weapons. Each of them have their own finishing animations which makes me wonder why resources were put into making them. They don't take a lot of space (talking megs here) but they require a few man-hours to implement. Animations and all. The game isn't exactly about killing, so half the current amount of weapons would've been just fine even though it's nice to find different items you can use always. I tend to beat down all the enemies I encounter rather than hide because they go down fairly easily on this difficulty setting and it's scarier to let them live and try to sneak past! I like the fact that they get up after some time but then again why can't you just rip their heads, arms and legs off or something to stop them from getting up?

The animations are obviously not motion captured and the characters' hands flail around loosely quite a bit. They don't seem firm. Makes them look weak and made of paper sort of, but this is an "issue" in many games. Nothing really bad but you notice it especially when in a few other games it's done so well (Uncharted, but then again that was motion-captured).

So, what about the feature that sets this game truly apart from the rest, sight-jacking. It's fun and all, and it's a feature that needs to be implemented in the very early stages of design to work well. For this series it was in all the way from the beginning so things work well. The action doesn't pause when sight-jacking so you need to be careful which is fine. Sight-jacking automatically comes on when an enemy spots you and I think it can be turned off from the setup menu if you don't like it. It slows down the framerate quite a bit (maybe on purpose, so as you don't run around with it on always, as if losing around half your screen already isn't bad enough). You can "bookmark" monsters and see what they see. It's a fun little feature and used cleverly in a few cases (looking at your friends in another room to check a clue from the environment). The monster growls and talking is very nice too and their movement is fun to follow. Voice-acting is terrible on the story character side (goes so far as to completely break the mood a few times), of which to note especially is a Japanese man who tries to talk English sometimes. It's not a problem that his English is bad, not everyone can speak the language, but it's like the actor never spoke a word in his life and is reading from a piece of paper. Truly horrible to hear him speak.

When you play the game you get to open up extras that tell more of the backgrounds of your characters. Some of these are really great like short video clips and so on. I like checking through the archive screen to find out all these little things that have been collected along the way. I think you get them simply by completing episodes. Completing the game gives you a summary of how well you did along with some "achievements" like not killing anyone etc. I've never been that interested in playing through highly linear story-driven games a second time (there are a few exceptions with some games that are just too good like CoD4) so they're not that interesting even though you can go through the game in chapter mode. It's not like Call of Duty 4 where you can show off the levels to your friends because they're all so different, this game is pretty much the same from beginning to end but not in a bad way, just in a "not much replay value" way for most of us. The ending is a bit weird and having a heavy metal background myself I found the final song to be insanely stupid :)

So that's Siren Blood Curse. I think it's an excellent game with fun gameplay for an excellent price. It's scary but not to the extent that you truly feel sick when playing it :) Silent Hill did that to me at numerous occasions but I still consider it one of the best series ever. The terror you feel when going through endless hospitals, misty streets and schools is too much at times in the Silent Hill games. In Blood Curse you have the fun "previously on" and "next episode" clips as well as a feeling like you're progressing from place to place in smaller blocks between which you can relax and have a Pepsi or something.

I'm a huge horror fan so maybe that's why but for some reason this game really hit a sweet spot for me. It's different enough to keep you interested to the very end and it plays well. Probably the best game on PSN currently.