Just in case you’ve been on the dark side of the moon for the last 5 years, or shy away from schlock-horror movies (then why are you even reading this? Huh?) and thus haven’t ever heard of the Saw franchise; Saw is a third person survival horror game based on the Saw movies. Now totalling seven, the Saw movies are the story of a mad-as-a-hare-but-imaginative killer named “Jigsaw” (played by the inimitable Tobin Bell), who likes to play games with his victims, always apparently giving them an opportunity to escape, but always at a cost as penance for what he sees as their misdemeanours. The “Saw” of the title comes from the first trial in the first movie, in which “all” a victim had to do to escape is saw their foot off! The game features many of the sadistic and deadly mechanical traps seen in the films, as well as some imaginatively gruesome new ones.

In the first game you had real-time combat and could use all sorts of things to kill people with; broom handles, water pipes, baseball bats, hatchets, guns, and even the occasional Molotov. In Saw II most of these have been removed for some reason, there is no gunplay or Molotov chucking whatsoever, and as badly implemented as it was in the first game I missed it. In Saw II everything (apart from dodging charging enemies) is done in a QTE (Quick Time Event) so all you have to do is press the ‘Square’ (or 'X' on a 360 pad) button to block and then a random one to attack the enemy. The QTEs are incredibly easy to do and remove much of the life & death tension that the first game had. Possibly the trickiest single thing you’ll have to do during active gameplay (and the only thing that’s harder than in the first game) is walk across a balance beam, which you’ll have to do several times and now is accomplished by pressing the L2/R2 buttons (L & R triggers on 360) to walk while keeping balance with the left stick. For some reason this seems to feel completely wrong, resulting in several deaths, mocking laughter from a Billy doll, a 15-20 second reload and the discovery that the level designers frequently put checkpoints in the stupidest, meanest places meaning that you have to plod back through a couple of empty non-event type rooms, climb a ladder, pick up a puzzle piece and then, and only then, attempt the stupid balance beam again. Sigh.

If you have a flashlight pressing ‘Triangle’ ('Y' on 360) turns it on, this is possibly the worst flashlight in a game, EVER, and for some reason the various other imaginative (if daft) ways of lighting your way in the first game have been dropped, as has the ability to set traps for you to lure your enemies into, which is a shame. The amount of things that have been dropped also means that there are even more chests of drawers and cupboards that glint at you only to reveal that they’re empty and you “Found Nothing.” Trust me; life is just too short to spend this much time searching empty bloody drawers.

Saw supplies a reasonable if slow-paced survival horror fix, and it’s definitely carving itself a niche of its own in the survival horror genre. The clunky controls will irritate and the game is very picky about where you look to use specific items, and operate switches/doors/open drawers etc. making things a lot fiddlier than they should have been, it’s a hangover from the first game that really should have been fixed, too many of the problems seem to have been carried over and some of the "fixes" for other parts of the game have rather emasculated it.