Product Description
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First, an earthquake! Then the emergency siren! Then, the world
as you knew it quickly evaporates into mayhem and evil. Find
yourself in a fictional Japanese village in 1942 as villagers
turn into zombies at alarming rates and the sea around the
village turns to blood and begins to engulf the town. You play as
one of 10 different characters in your personal fight for
survival. Play in areas like the school and an abandoned mine as
you fight to stay alive and find the true cause of the evil
forces around you. Horrifying sounds and visuals will get your
heart pounding and everything can change in the blink of an eye.
Review
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The creepy tale of a possessed Japanese village (Hanuda) told
through the eyes of ten playable characters in combination with
some impressively innovative gameplay features should totally
make my day – but playing Siren turns out to be sadly different
than I was expecting.
The game's two big features: jacking (where you see through
the eyes of other characters) and the Link Navigator (which
manages the plot's order of events) sadly don't add to the
player's experience enough to justify their problematic
existence.
jacking is more fun to mess around with than it is helpful
to the player. Watching the paths of roaming enemies can offer
useful information, but the stealth mechanic is so simplistic
that the data is rarely necessary. In many situations, being seen
by enemies is something that you can't avoid or recover from –
they will find you, and they will kill you. This is fine by me,
but when the only stealth-orientated skill that is offered is a
painfully slow crawl (and a distracting yell, which had little to
no effect that I could perceive), it doesn't make me want to be
all that sneaky. There isn't a sound meter, no real way to know
if enemies can see you or not (like a vision cone or shadow
meter), and very little chance of distracting them with
diversions. It is more fun and more efficient to just run through
levels and see what happens than to use the jacking feature
to suss out a plan of attack.
Which leads to discussion of the game's other big feature, the
Link Navigator. Siren's storytelling plan sounds like a survival
horror Real World season: Pick 10 characters to escape the
apocalypse and find out what happens over 3 days through 78
missions – you could call it Siren: Hanuda. The complication is
that the order of events is jumbled and the Link Navigator is
supposed to help you keep track. What this means, from a player's
point of view, is that the game's story doesn't really get its
hook into you – not even in the first few hours. The tales are
too disjointed, the characters too many, and the plot too slow in
getting going.
The more conventional aspects of this game like sound design and
graphics are also something that people will have mixed feelings
about. The creatures' insane, maniacal laughs are honestly
unnerving, and therefore good for this game. The graphics look to
be actual pictures of the characters' faces and lend a realistic,
but still skewed version of each person – they're detailed, but
strangely flat. I think that this is a nice subtle touch, but
others may disagree.
I really, really wanted to like Siren, but in the end, I just
didn't have much fun or feel like the innovative parts of the
game were used to their advantage. It has good ideas, and I'm
glad to see experimentation in survival horror, but this should
be chalked up as a failed test in the genre.
Concept:
Navigate a horrific village as ten different characters
Graphics:
Muddy and jerky – but it fits with the disjointed feel of the
gameplay
Sound:
The best part of this game, the sound effects are creepy and (for
lack of a better word) icky
Playability:
The context-sensitive menu system is counter-intuitive and the
stealth mechanics are pretty archaic and basic
Entertainment:
I really need a reason to care in a game this cerebral and
slow-paced, and Siren doesn't give it to me
Replay:
Moderate
Rated: 6.25 out of 10
Editor: Lisa Mason
Issue: May 2004
2nd Opinion:
From a conceptual standpoint, Siren is chock-full of ingenuity,
and is a soaring success when it comes to the delivery of unusual
ideas. Forming a mental bond with your attackers so that you see
the surroundings from their perspective is a great idea that
leads to some unnerving situations. This gimmick only goes so
far, however. I found its functionality, and the entire gameplay
package for that matter, to be clunky, and above all,
frustrating. I grew so disenchanted with trying to pick up enemy
that I avoided using this technique whenever I could. I
love the episodic approach to storytelling – but the execution of
gameplay bothered me to no end.
Rated: 5.75 out of 10
Editor: Andrew Reiner
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Review
- Choose to play one of 10 characters -- all with their own equipment, abilities & storylines.
- Use your wits, senses & ability to move fast -- stay out of or the zombies will come after you in force.
- Some characters have companions -- you'll have to defend them while you play.
- Stealth action combines with strategic gameplay, as you avoid the zombies and prepare to fight through them when you must.
- Eerily realistic characters with motion-captured movements, combined with cinematic camera angles, bring this creepy game world to life.