SIREN: Blood Curse

"Groundhog Day - Test of Courage and Patience....well, mostly patience."

Siren: Blood Curse/New Translation is a somewhat different game in the survival horror genre. It first game out on the PS2 and created some fuzz back in the day. The PS3 installation of the same game is easily one of those games you wish you love, but you can't. A remake (sort of) of the original Siren on the PS2, it brings great promises, but gets repetitive. A few guys trapped in a time-loop, and re-living the same day over and over again, much like the movie Groundhog Day. Sadly, the player is also stucked in a time-loop, often wonder the same area over and over, only with different on-screen protagonists. In a nutshell, the gameplay could be summed up in one sentence: Dodge zombies, find a weapon, knock zombies out, find the exit.

But isn't that the usual formula of survival horror genre, you ask? Certainly, however with Siren, you'd better get used to dying every 5 minutes. It is one of those game that you have to ABSOLUTELY know where you are going, and what you need to do. Especially during many stages of the game, you will need to perform certain tasks, saving certain people within a time frame. But you WILL not know what the time-frame is as there are no timer that tells you how much time you have left. A lot of times when you are still scratching your head trying to figure out what you want to do, only to have the game tell you YOU ARE DEAD because your target has been killed.

The biggest problem for me though, is how weak your characters are without a weapon, and how much that character has to do even without a weapon. For majority of the game, you start a stage without one. And the best part is? The game will MAKE you try to avoid zombies either by using the crippled sight-jack system or you have to quickly run through a horde of zombies in an area you have never been before. One particular stage, you need to avoid about 10 zombies before you can finally grab a weapon. However you are given very little space and very little clue as what to do next. So you often find yourself surrounded by a bunch of zombies, and have no idea where the exit is. So get used to dying, because you will die, many times until your frustrations looms you much more than the horrifying zombies on screen. And the best part? You will have a chance to go through the VERY SAME area AGAIN in the next chapter! With a different character, but same old crap, different day. Really, it gets old.

I am not sure about you, but being totally helpless in a game isn't exactly my cup of tea, and the game does NOT make "weaponless" interesting. Playing through Siren, I find myself feeling desperate trying to just advance the story, if I don't have a weapon with me. And a certain character that has a somewhat important role in the plot will go through the ENTIRE game without a weapon, that character will die immediately upon getting within 2 feet of a zombie. To me that was the most frustrating aspect of the game. You can only rely on this system called sight-jacking.

Which brings us to another problem. Sight-jacking is a great concept, but it does not execute very well. It is basically a system that allows a split screen, one side is you, the other is the eye of a zombie. You can lock on to one zombie's view and sort of play with 2 screens. Sounds fun huh? It is not.

Everytime when you sight-jack, the screen will start to lag, especially if you are running real fast. It is probably due to the PS3 hardware's inability to render 3D models in HD. It just gives you plain headache when an entire screen is moving, blurring and lagging. And you can view up to 3 zombies' view at a time, and needless to say, the lag is unbearable. It is almost like looking at 4 slideshow. It's not video, it's like animations that goes about 2 frames per sec. There are areas in the game that you almost are required to use 3 lock-on sight-jacks, and frankly, it's just plenty of headaches.

Survivor horror games are extremely fun, like the early Resident Evil series or my favorite Fatal Frame series. However for Siren, it is more annoyance than enjoyable. Gameplay is repetitive, characters are not likable, and you can only tolerate so much running away.

I really want to like this game, the atmosphere is great and the darkness of the surrounding is just dark enough for you to see (unlike Silent Hill: Origins, you might as well play the game blind-folded, it wouldn't make much differences.) However the repetitive gameplay, uninteresting characters and the flawed sight-jack system turned me away. However, if there ever will be a Siren 2, I would still be very interested. Siren: Blood Curse/New Translation is certainly different, a breath of fresh air; albeit a somewhat foul one towards the end.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/14/09

Game Release: SIREN: New Translation (JP, 07/24/08)