Siren

"An Innovative and Surprisingly Fun Survival Horror Game"

This was a fun game that I felt was criminally overlooked last year. It also did a really good job of looking sounding and feeling like a Japanese horror movie. It also has the innovative sight jack ability (more on that later).

Story: (9/10)
The story of Siren is really good. A young man named Kyoya Suda was riding his bike home one day when he came across a young girl and her dog. She looks sick so he calls out to her the girl runs away from Kyoya. Kyoya continues to walk when he hears people chanting he stares through the bushes and witnesses some kind of ritual. One of the people taking part of the ritual recognizes Kyoya and cries out. Kyoya, scared beyond all reason begins running. A policeman stands in front of him mumbling crazily and shoots at Kyoya. The people in the town of Hanuda (a fictional town in Japan, I think) have been turned into zombies called Shibito. But they're not the sort of groaning slow sort of zombies from the original Dawn of the Dead, they still retain some of their humanity. So now it's up to the survivors in Hanuda to not only survive and escape from Hanuda, but to figure out how the normal townspeople got turned into the Shibito, and why the bridge leading into the town has been destroyed and the water turned blood red.

Graphics: (9/10)
The graphics in Siren are absolutely great. The environments are well done and looks like a deserted ghost town. The character models are pretty good as well and move rather fluidly. The Shibito look awesome. They look a lost like normal humans except they're skin is grayer than normal human skin, and it looks like blood is pouring out of their eye sockets. I like it how when you sight jack a Shibito (see through their eyes basically) you can see them going through their everyday routine, like some Shibito will be doing some gardening using a Kama (hand scythe), while another just hammers away at a piece of wood. The cinematics look almost like someone shot this with a real camera and just filmed these people. The character's themselves, are apparently modeled after real Japanese film and television actors. The flying Shibito, and the Shibito Brain just look really awesome in this game.

Sound: (9/10)
Siren's sound in this game is just really well done. The music is used in a brilliant way, and just swells when you are sighted by a Shibito. The voiceovers in the cinematics are well done, and well directed. But something that's odd is the fact that everyone has a thick British accent, most would complain about this but I think it lends more to the authenticity of the game, making it feel more like a dubbed Japanese horror film. One of the things that makes this game suspenseful is that when you sight jack a Shibito you hear it groaning and growling as they search for you. The screech that the Shibito make when one of them sees you invokes a feeling of fear.

Gameplay: (8/10)
The game plays like a cross between Splinter Cell and Silent Hill. One of the innovations in this game is the ability to sight jack your opponents (see through their eyes), this becomes a vital ability to use later in the game. This game gets to be a very difficult affair, but mainly because it uses the tried and true, trial and error style of design. Aside from that this game plays a lot like a Resident Evil or Silent Hill. This is a very good game and it plays well, but it does tend to get a little tedious after an amount of time. One of the things that's really neat in this game is when you sight jack a Shibito, and if it saw you, you can actually watch it kill you. It's just a trip watching yourself being killed for not eluding that enemy that seemed so obvious to evade. Also in most survival horror games you only play as one character throughout the whole game but in this game you play as twelve or so characters which is pretty cool.

It's really quite amazing that this amazing game got overlooked. The game creates a good atmosphere akin to Japanese horror movies maybe that's why people didn't like it, I don't know, but this was a fun game. Maybe people didn't like the fact that many of the levels had you play through the same levels again. But it's disappointing that such fun games get overlooked. At least the developers of Siren decided to make a sequel to the game. But if you like survival horror games you should definitely get Siren it's really fun.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/04/05