Saw II: Flesh and Blood Review

Jigsaw wants you to play another game, but should you run in terror?

 didn't enjoy the first Saw game. It had bad, repetitious level and puzzle design, and some truly awful combat. Sadly, Saw II: Flesh and Blood, the sequel pumped out in just a year, does essentially nothing to change this, somehow even making the combat worse.

Prepare yourselves; Jigsaw wants to play another crappy game.

Saw II follows the story from the films, placing you in control of a young Michael Tapp (the son of Danny Glover's character from the movies), who is trapped in an elaborate maze set up by the serial killer Jigsaw. Beyond that the story is hopelessly lost on anyone not familiar with the movies, as character after character is introduced throughout the game in a manner that assumes player has memorized the cast of every chapter in the series. However, Saw II has lots of additional reading material that you can collect to try which sheds some light on what's going on, but unless you're ready to do some reading on Wikipedia you'll find yourself as lost as I was.



OK, so storytelling isn't Saw II's strong point, but you'd at least hope they could at least get the horror aspect right. Sadly, no. The game is full of traps that will kill you outright, such as shotguns trigged by opening doors, or tripwires on the ground, but these are repeated so much that you eventually anticipate them. Jigsaw goes from diabolically clever serial killer to tired and predictable after just the first two hours of the story.

Even the puzzles that won't kill you outright end up being little more than repetitious speed bumps to finishing the game. Countless doors require you to move some segmented wires around so that the power travels from the source to a switch, while other times you'll have some other item that is only obtainable through doing a simple game of pressing lights on and off (pressing the switch makes the adjacent lights turn on or off, depending on the state they were before). Saw II has a few of these simple puzzles and it beats them right into the ground. Occasional twists on the mechanic also fall flat (making players manipulate two wires is not clever), making these "puzzles" feel more like nuisances put in the game to turn it into a multiple hour experience.

The major set-piece puzzles of Saw II are also uninspired. The last Saw videogame had a few unique puzzles wherein the player was tasked with saving a major character from an elaborate trap. Saw II also has these, but they're either minor twists on what was seen in the last game, or simple tasks that are introduced so that they can be repeated ad nauseum in other parts of the story. Even when these puzzles manage to introduce a cool element, such as one that makes you do simple match-two-similar-pictures while also keeping a victim out of cycling jets of fire, they become frustrating affairs thanks to the fact that slipping up almost always causes instant failure. Learning by failing is ok if actually teaches you (see: Limbo), but in Saw II it just feels punitive.

The environments are imposing at first, until you realize that nothing is going to jump out and scare you without prompting you first. The only reason you'll find not to run headlong into darkness is the occasional bit of glass or acid on the ground (you're barefoot). Otherwise you are always prompted when you run into an enemy, or even given a chance to mash a button to dodge a hidden trip wire. And don't worry about getting lost in the dark, either, because despite there being a map the game is so linear that you'll never need it.

Combat was almost universally panned in the last Saw game, and Saw II somehow manages to make it worse. Instead of the clunky combat of yester-year, players are now forced to suffer through a quick-time event. You can argue all you want that the previous game didn't require all that much skill when it came to fighting, but simply inputting a few buttons to take out foes not only isn't fun, it takes all the suspense out of wondering when and where they're going to attack you from.

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