Diehard GameFAN: Saw Review (360)

SAW is a surprisingly solid game that ends up being not bad for a first crack at the franchise, as the game is creepy and challenging enough to sell you for a while, and with a little more imagination and play-testing it might have been a real winner, astonishingly enough. The story, visuals and audio match up to the theme of the films well, and they're bleak, creepy and disconcerting enough to please both horror fans and film fans nicely. The gameplay is interesting overall, and the puzzles thrown at you are diverse and complex enough to get you through the first half of the game with few complaints. However, there's absolutely no reason to go back to the game once you've finished it unless you want to try the other difficulty level or miss a couple achievements as you play. Further, the combat system is unwieldy at best and broken at worst, and while it's great that the game gives you numerous ways to deal with assailants WITHOUT fighting, this does not make up for having broken combat mechanics in the first place. The game also loses its imagination about halfway through the experience, choosing to subject you to the same puzzles under harsher penalties instead of coming up with new puzzles to test you, which makes the second half of the game drag a bit more than it should have. As a first attempt at making a game of the franchise, SAW is a solid effort, and with some more imagination and development time the inevitable sequel should be a good game overall, but as it stands, this game will only be worth the cost for fans of the genre or the series. Everyone else can rent it or wait for a price drop. -