Saw II: Flesh and Blood

While still trying to clear out my big backlog, Saw II felt like the right game to play next. It appeared to be a medium length completion with a linear path – so relatively straightforward. The one thing I didn’t bank on was my Xbox 360 hard drive having a meltdown over playing the game. Luckily this was overcome by… using a different Xbox 360.

Anyway, Saw II follows the story of Michael Tapp, detective Tapp’s son, as he is imprisoned by Jigsaw and has to make his way through a set of life-endangering puzzles where he meets people from his past and will have to save them – it’s not like the movies, if you don’t save them it’s game over and you have to start again.

Gameplay wise, it took me a while to get on board with it. Michael doesn’t control very well for the most part, getting stuck on various bits of furniture and not being very good at running. Whenever you have to do anything quickly, it’ difficult and not by intentional design. The combat is also laughable and to be honest, frankly pointless. There are so many things in the house that can kill you, you really don’t need some random dudes who want to kill you for no reason, running at you with baseball bats, only for you to press x, perform a quick-time event and insta-kill them. Seeing as I’ve mentioned quick time events, the game is littered with them. Almost every time you open a door you have to do some kind of button prompt to avoid Michael suffering from instantaneous death.

Musically while it does keep to the theme of Saw, it becomes very repetitive playing the same notes over and over again, normally directly after a quick time event – of which there are loads. Graphically, it hasn’t aged well and looks more dated that its 2010 release date.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Of the 50 achievements, 13 of them are earned by playing through the main story. Outside of the main story, there are three categories of achievement – difficulty specific, collectibles and fucking irritating.

I’ll cover the fucking irritating ones first because they are the most fun. Now, games do not need 50 achievements. There is no law or code that requires developers to have a specific amount of achievements (10 is the minimum on Xbox One now). There would have been nothing wrong with only having 46 achievements in the game. Hell, Condemned even went as far as not having 1,000 points total Gamerscore.

My point here is that we do not need, nor do we want to have to play Saw II on Halloween or Christmas Day so please don’t put achievements in your games for these things. There is still the traditional work around of going offline, changing your date settings and playing to trick the game into thinking it’s a specific day. But still, why have them in there?

Also in this category, are the missable ones for making a decision at the beginning of the game that impacts the end of the game and has achievements attached to both choices. This essentially makes you play the whole thing twice. This is only an issue with a game like this because it’s so linear with no other way to play. The only difference is the end where you get to see a different cut scene. Totally pointless but there is a workaround. If you pass the test at the beginning, you can play the whole game and see one ending and then reload the last chapter and getting the other one. But it only works this way around.

On to the collectibles of which there are three sets and a lot of them. However, as the levels are linear there isn’t a lot of exploring that needs to be done to get them, with the exception of the Billy dolls. These take some getting and you will need to solve some difficult puzzles to get them all.

Lastly there are the achievements for beating certain times for certain puzzles throughout the game on both normal and insane difficulty. The only one of these that’s a pain in the ass is the gear box puzzle because after you complete it, it’s a checkpoint meaning if you fail, you have to start the chapter from the beginning each time. Even if you know you weren’t fast enough and quit, the last checkpoint is far enough away to be really irritating every time you play it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While Saw II was not an overly stressful completion, it was rather dull and clocks in at 10 to 12 hours in terms of time. There’s not a lot of replayability and it’s more of an action game than horror so even if you do play it on Halloween, it’s unlikely to give you a scare.