Siren

"Devent, but constant death doesn't equal fun, it equals frustration."

Ah Siren… a game promising so much. A unique way of telling a storyline, a new way to throw a few scares at you and classical Japanese horror flair tossed in for good measure. Fitting snugly into the survival horror genre, Siren boasts a lot of features and does offer a few good scares, but promptly falls short in almost every category.

Gameplay: 5/10
- Unfortunately, the game begins to fail right where it counts the most. While I wouldn't say that the gameplay is clunky by any means, characters usually are pretty responsive and there are few times where you'll make a mistake that wasn't your fault, but it's the play mechanics that make things difficult. You see, the main unique ability that all the characters have in Siren is the ability to ‘sight jack' any NPC in a given area. Using this ability lets you see through the eyes of the current character that you've selected. The idea behind this is that by constant sight jacking you can tell where all your enemies are in relation to you and as such, hopefully avoid them. However, things rarely work out that way. For starters, sight jacking isn't really very helpful when half of the time you are forced to head the direction that most Shibito are patrolling. The game tries to compensate for this by making the enemies turn around every now and then or slightly wonder off of a given path just slightly. However, the only way to tell when the enemy can no longer see you is to sight jack them and this creates another problem. When in sight jack mode you can't move. In fact, in order to even see through a given person's point of view, you have to roll around the left control stick to just the right area (which is usually seemingly random) and then tap the sight jack button again after you finally figure out which enemy is near you and run for it. What's the problem with this? By the time you've figured everything out, the enemy will have found you anyways and you've just wasted a lot of time for nothing.
In fact, much of the game devolves into nothing but trial and error where the player will be given an objective and then you just run around the level dying multiple times until you can figure out the best path where the least amount of enemies will be. Most of this is even guesswork too as despite the fact that you're given a map, your current position is never shown. Instead, different landmarks are pointed out and you then get to judge where you are based on this information. It's different and sometimes fun and even a bit more realistic, but sometimes it's frustrating trying to decide exactly where you are. This problem is compounded by the fact that most puzzles presented in the game are very abstract and involves getting to a very specific location which can be difficult when you can't figure out where the heck you are. The game really pushes stealth but I found it far easier to just haul ass across each level avoiding any snipers along the way. At least that way when you die (which will happen a TON) you won't feel quite so cheated.
Perhaps one of the biggest complaints I have of the game though is how annoyingly frustrating the enemies are, especially any enemy with a gun. While most of the characters in the game don't really have any weapons to use to begin with (Also lending to the ‘run like a chicken with your head cut off' syndrome the game seems to push), playable characters that actually do get weapons might as well not even have them. To actually stop and fight an enemy almost always guarantees death. You think that you're timing the swing of your fire poker just right but you'll often miss anyway and the enemy will return the favor by offering you a nice axe in the face. Plus, the game loves to throw in a multitude of snipers who always seem to have amazing aim. You see, I guess to also try to add a bit more to the realism of the game and thus enhance the fear, most playable characters can only be hit once or twice before they drop dead. Against a Shibito with a knife you may be able to take 3 or 4 hits, but often one gunshot wound will drop you. Even more frustrating is that most of these snipers are put in strategic locations around the map so that they are almost always in your way and they have incredible aim. You might as well be carrying a tracker on you that allows all the enemies to see you using GPS or something. A sniper will almost ALWAYS spot you before you can make visual confirmation and even if you actually survive long enough to get somewhere close to them, you often can't do anything to take them out anyways. As I said, most characters don't have weapons and even the ones who do usually can't aim in any other direction than straight ahead or you'll have some sort of melee weapon which is only good for hitting something 2 inches in front of you. How I longed to hurl my tire iron at a foe pumping me full of lead. Instead I just found myself furiously throwing the controller at the TV screen in hopes that maybe when I broke the screen it'd take out the Shibito with it. How do you like THOSE cheap tactics you stupid Shibito!?!

Story: 7/10
-The story behind the game is actually kind of interesting and the way that it's presented is fairly unique. Basically, some creepy things are going down in the secluded mountain town of Hanuda where a sea of red appears around the town and the almost constant call of the siren is pulling its residents into the sea. When they emerge from the waters, the townspeople are transformed into the Shibito, basically another word for decomposing, slobbering zombies. However, not everyone is lured into the red waters. This is where things get interesting as the story is never shown through the eyes of just one person. The game constantly shifts to the perspectives of a multitude of playable characters, most with very unique personalities.
The game follows a mission based structure system where you are constantly shifted around on a timeline basically surrounding the few days of this incident, but some areas take you back a few years and even a few days after the incident occurred. For example, you may play one level timed at 11:00 PM and then play as a character in the same area at 11:30 PM and you'll be able to see the direct effects of what the character before initiated. Oftentimes you'll also play multiple missions involving characters actions taking place at the same time. This offers a unique perspective on the events happening around this crazy town and while confusing at first, helps to slowly unravel the mystery behind Hanuda.

Graphics: 8/10
- Not too much to say here, the game while not particularly impressive does have a graphical style that fits the atmosphere of the events quite well. The game is usually quite dark and has a very grainy style to it. One of the stranger effects of the game is how the characters facial expressions are presented. As someone in game talks to you, instead of smooth animation, changes in mouth position and eye movement are blurred and almost edited together roughly. It's surprisingly creepy and makes the whole game appear as if it's all some sort of strange dream. My biggest complaint though here is how limited your line of sight is verses your enemies. As stated before, almost every enemy will see you FAR before you can see them on screen and as such you have to run frantically away so that you aren't instantly killed. Also, this may fall into the category of gameplay more, but the game likes to switch you for just an instant to the enemies point of view whenever you're spotted. While this may sound good on paper, in execution it's not so good. Too often would I know that an enemy was 2 inches in front of me and try to run past them just to run straight into their snarling arms because the point of view changed and I lost track of which way I was going. Quite frustrating.

Audio: 8/10
- The audio of the game is quite good and is usually creates perhaps the scariest atmosphere behind the game. You see, when you sight jack an enemy, you also get to hear whatever is going on around the enemy, which is often quite unpleasant. Lots of really disturbing grunts and howls abound and it made sight jacking something that you really didn't want to do much just because it's freaky being in the head of something making that many creepy noises. I mean really, would you want to hear the sounds of a million howling demon babies all hours of the day? No, you probably don't.
There's a problem here as well though. Apparently Sony of America didn't see it as necessary to do a rerecording of the voices from the European release of the game (Siren was released in the UK first). This comes across as…. sort of odd. For one, and maybe it's just me, English accents just don't really fit for this sort of setting and two, while the voice acting is pretty decent, the VA often is far too calm for it's own good. One example? I once reeled up a bucket out of a well and an ethereal hand grabbed my characters arm and what was the voice actor's response? "Oh my, better throw that one back. Care for a spot of tea?" Ok, so I embellished a bit, but that's how it came across.

Replay Value: 4/10
- Alright, this is an odd section. The game has a TON of potential content for replay. There's so much hidden away and so many vague secondary objectives that I imagine that someone could be playing this game for weeks if not months on end trying to find every single little hidden thing, but I still mark this down because you wouldn't want to and far too often the game forces you to search for these stupid intricacies. The game starts you out in these crazy ‘loops' where you will be forced to replay the same stages over and over and over again until you finally figure out some way to unlock some other crazy second objective before you can move onto newer missions. Will it's kind of cool to see changes in different levels, I hate how they make me see them this way. Just when you think you've hit this great groove and things are going great, the game hurls you back to a level you played hours ago with hardly ANYTHING changed at all. This is especially bad when you have to replay a particularly annoying mission. On one hand, replay value is a good thing. On the other hand, forcing the player into this replayability is bad. It really makes me feel like the developers were all sitting around the table one day and decided that their game wasn't long enough so one brilliant guy said, “Hey! How about we FORCE people to replay the same levels over and over again! Am I a genius or what?” No Mr. developer, you are an idiot.

Buy or Rent?
- As I said before, some people could play this for months on end and not find all the hidden things the game has to offer, but I just can't recommend this game for anything other then a rental. Perhaps if you rent it and like it, sure, go pick it up, but if you just go out and pull this one off the shelves and pay $40 for it, you're likely to be disappointed. I can't put this game at anything other than average. It does some things well, but it really doesn't impress in any way either. You'll have just as much frustration as you will fun with this game, but for the person who can plumb the depths the game offers, there's plenty to find. Let's just hope that the upcoming sequel can be improve on some of these faults because with a little work, Siren could really be a standout game.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/07/04