The Suffering Review
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| This ain't the Lollipop Guild. |
While the game does have a large psychological component, it also serves up enough combat, and quite bloody combat at that, to keep action fans satisfied. You can choose to move and fight in a first or third person view, and control is smooth and fluid in either and makes use of the standard WASD/mouselook scheme. You will have the chance to wield a number of weapons, from a prisoner�s shiv all the way to a machine gun. Fighting is a point and click affair and although this is standard for the genre it would have been nice to have a little more depth to the hand to hand fighting. Torque apparently has a little of the old black magic in himself as well, as killing demons will provide him with the energy to temporarily turn himself into an indestructible demonic killing machine that can tear apart demons with ease. Overall the monster AI is pretty average, and you�ll mostly be taking on demons as they try to charge you head on. It�s not all about the combat in The Suffering as there is some simple puzzle-solving in the game. However, they are all pretty much of the find the right switch or the move the right object variety.
The Suffering is a console port and unfortunately there are a few problems as a result. The graphics were not re-polished for the PC�s screen. You can play the game at higher resolution settings, but it will still resemble a console game more than a PC game. There are also occasional graphical issues from clipping problems to buggy breakdowns in the graphics. On the audio side, the game has the odd habit of sometimes playing lines over each other, so you may find yourself trying to listen to a character while both your good and evil conscience are speaking in unison over his voice. A little more work on the game before its release would have gone a long way to preventing these glitches from affecting your enjoyment of the game, but they are not so bad or so common to warrant a recommendation to avoid the game.
These issues aside, The Suffering is overall an enjoyable game that manages to build far more atmosphere than most other games can even aspire to. If you�re looking for a bit of a creep-out and need a break from shooting Nazis and terrorists, then The Suffering is well worth your time.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
85%. The creepiest game to come along in quite some time.
Final Rating: 85% - The creepiest game to come along in quite some time.
Note: A review code for this game was provided by the publisher.