You know; it just occurred to me that Forbidden Siren and Eastenders have lots in common. One is dark and depressing, with constant rain and moaning individuals, with mediocre acting and teeth-grindingly bad cockney accents, and the other is the BBC's finest soap opera.

OK, so it may not be the most positive way to start a videogames review, but I thought I'd follow suit from how the game is presented on-screen to you, the gamer. You may have read in the press or on web forums about the rather dubious voice acting in Forbidden Siren, but you really won't understand the full extent of its badness until you have witnessed it for yourself. Now some games have bad acting, such as the PlayStation Resident Evil series (although the more recent GC versions are much-improved), but they are hindered more by the cheesy dialogue than anything, and at least the actors in the game were white, and the voices were performed by white Americans. However in FS (Forbidden Siren), the voice acting is bloody awful guvnor, and the actors have extremely strong London accents. Now this in any regular videogame would be bad, but considering the game is eerie, very creepy and made to make your skin crawl (which it does superbly), the acting really does destroy the atmosphere. How hard would it of been to at least leave the Japanese sound track in and add English subtitles as an option? It ruins the Plymouth Argyle of the game and is basically utter Turkish Delight. (Sorry.. that's: 'Style' and 'Shite' for all our non-cockney readers).

   

The story of FS is rather strange. The game is set over time and a number of days, and after each mission you switch characters and start playing their part of the story. Then after a mission or two you will start back with the original character you began with. It's nice switching between the characters, and it also mixes the gameplay up slightly. For example, some characters will carry a gun, or have to find a weapon, whereas others will have to sneak around the level, which may be infested with the enemy.

You start off as a young Japanese boy, and have to escape a car park area with a mad zombie policeman shooting at you. You don't have a gun to fire at him, you just have to escape the area. There is a van in the car park, so you think "Ahh cool, I'll jump in the van and escape the level!". So you go up to the van, but it is locked. So it's a find-a-key regular survival horror standard then? Well no, because SCEJ make things awkward. You'll soon enough find the key, so you press the action button (X) to pick the item up. This brings a message up on-screen saying "You have found a key. To pick it up press triangle". So you have to confirm that message, then press triangle to bring up yet another menu to get a confirmation if you want to pick the key up…

You then trek outside and go up to the van, and press X to open the lock. Up pops: "The van door is locked. To unlock van door press triangle". So you press triangle, and you get: "Van door is locked, would you like to unlock YES/NO?"… So you get in the van drivers seat, and the nightmare continues two fold. You have the zombie madman cop shooting at you, and then you have to juggle two action buttons and menus to continue. Around 10 key presses later you have got the van driving along and the mission is over. Apart from a cut scene with the young lad bending over the knocked-down policeman to see if he's ok.

   

The controls are overcomplicated in this respect, and coupled with other non-intuitive control functions, FS doesn't always feel as slick as it could do. It makes you wonder if they purposely make the controls like this, to try and enhance the 'scare factor' in the game. Along with it being a quite disturbing game, add controls that aren't exactly smooth, and you find yourself worrying whether you'll be able to escape or not...

The overall atmosphere of the game is terrifying - you are genuinely scared when you are playing this game. Play it at night, in a dark room with good headphones and the volume cranked up and you'll be filling your pants. You have to use stealth manoeuvres to avoid being seen. You do this by going into the enemies eyes in a mode called sight-jack. In this, your monitor is displaying static, and you have to "tune" in on enemies by slowly moving the left analog stick around in a circular motion. Once you have an enemy tuned in, you can assign that particular frequency to a button (triangle, circle etc), so you can go back to it at any time. Some levels will have 2 or more enemies on so it's a handy feature to have. It's also pretty scary hearing their moans and to see what weapons they are carrying… then you realise they're right behind you! When in the distance, you are shown as a blue cross when looking through their eyes, and they are shown as a red cross in normal vision… Until you can see them of course - then you run. Fast.

   

Scoring Forbidden Siren is hard. It has all the right ingredients to make a truly great survival horror game, and it's nice to see a developer trying something new with the stealth-biased gameplay. However the controls in the game can be fiddly and frustrating to use at first, but you do get used to them. It just depends if you can stick out the first couple of hours of painful familiarisation. Also the voice acting really is terrible, and it can really put you off playing as you want to laugh at the game instead of being interested in the plot, which isn't good. If you do stick with Forbidden Siren though, you'll be rewarded with a very interesting experience that keeps tension at the maximum throughout the entire time you play.