Just when you thought it was safe to turn the lights off at night and play something cute and fluffy, yet another survival horror game gets released. Midway is dishing out the scares this time, so what do they have to offer over the other well-established franchises such as Capcom's Resident Evil and Konami’s Silent Hill? Other than those two, gamers in recent months have been treated to a lot of choice in this genre, and each one of them has tried to ‘weird-out’ the player by scaring them in various - and in some cases ingenious – ways. So how will The Suffering grab your attention?

The game begins in a prison. You are an inmate, and by the sounds of things, quite a nasty f*****g piece of work, called ‘Torque’. You get a short cut scene of the main character being thrown into a f*****g cell left to f*****g rot. You seem to be fairly well known in the prison, as other prisoners are talking about you, saying you’re a bad mother f****r. As I am sure you will have realized by now, The Suffering contains language that is nothing short of unbelievable, with lots of profanity and various sexually explicit words being spat out by the characters, and some lovely insults such as “shit-boy” also doing the rounds. Quite scary, so far then. At the end of the cut scene, an unseen attacker comes into the room, and wipes out virtually everyone in sight – blood everywhere. There’s a lot of blood in The Suffering, and it gets splattered everywhere, often all over Torque. Anyway, Torque, of course, is alive and well, and your job now is to escape the prison…

One very unique feature in The Suffering which solves the most common problem in 3D games is its camera system. At any point in the game, you can switch from the standard third-person viewpoint and change to first-person. This is a great feature for aiming at enemies in the distance, and for looking up on the ceiling, which proves very helpful. Aiming and moving around works really well in both camera modes, but I did find myself sticking with third-person most of the time as you get a slightly better view on the action due to your peripheral vision.

The enemies you come across are very strange creatures, and they appear to be mutated from an unknown source. The character design on them is fantastic, and they look brilliant. I then read that they were designed by Stan Winston Studios, the same company involved with the creatures from the Aliens movies, so you can understand why they are so good.

The frame rate can also drop below its usual 30fps display when the screen gets busy with enemies or special effects, which can make aiming and movement difficult. There is also a general lack of polish in the game, which is shame. Some of the textures are rough, and the models of the other characters you meet in the game are average at best. Shooting an enemy when they a near a wall will make half of their body clip through the wall, and there are some serious pop-up issues when outside. These are the sort of things that should be fixed or at least improved upon during the closing months of a project, but unfortunately they were not fixed for this game.

Overall, The Suffering is a pretty good game, and does feel different from other games in the growing survival horror genre. If you have played every other game which falls in this category, then chances are you’ll quite like it, even though it doesn’t have quite the same overall level of quality and polish that the others out there do. However, if you are a survival horror virgin, I would have to recommend Capcom or Konami’s releases over this title.