The Suffering : Games : Web Wombat

Mature gaming has been making progress in leaps and bounds over the past few years, from stylish and slick productions like Max Payne to the politically-incorrect-for-no-damned-reason Postal 2.

Following in the tradition of the former rather than the latter, and standing somewhere between Evil Dead and The Shawshank Redemption, The Suffering is not a game for kiddie-winks by any stretch of the imagination.

Containing enough gore to fill a couple of Olympic-sized swimming pools and plenty of wonderfully blatant profanity, this is horror at its most heavy-handed.

You are Torque, supposed murderer, all-round tough guy and the latest addition to Abbott State Penitentiary, a prison on the spooky and blood-soaked island of Carnate, built to house Death Row inmates.

Within minutes of your cell door slamming shut, demons start coming out of the woodwork and what was going to be a quiet wait for the gas chamber turns into a white-knuckled anything-goes fight for survival against the nastiest hellspawn to be seen this side of Lucifer's barbeque fork.

Unlike a lot of that which is considered modern horror, The Suffering fails to subscribe to the 'show-all' method of story telling, where the plot and characters take a back seat to the explicit gore, instead treading a thin line between atmosphere through omission and hardcore violence.

A lot of the first act is spent wandering around Abbott State with the lights out, looking for a flashlight, hearing things scuttling around in the dark, and it is only after much scariness and dismemberment that you get to go toe-to-toe with said things.

And things they are, make no mistake. Midway has employed the creative skills of creature-FX gurus Stan Winston Studios (the warped minds behind Aliens and the Predator) in their quest to give The Suffering a special something and boy, does it show.

Yummy!

The menagerie includes mannequins with foot-long shivs for limbs, crippled mutants that hurl syringes full of cyanide, ogres with rifles embedded in their very skin, the disembodied soul of a prison warden and a disembowelled, not to mention quite shocked victim of the electric chair.

Atmosphere through omission can only suspend one's belief for a certain amount of time, and it is when the rubber meets the road that The Suffering really shines, with set pieces that get the blood pumping, and action that delivers meaty thrills time and time again.

When Torque fights his way through the ranks of the horde, you are left in no doubt that this is adult entertainment as heads explode, limbs are blown off and things die in many and various ways.

While this is cool, cooler still is that, as the fight wears on, gore spatters the protagonist from top to toe, eventually rendering him a fury dispensing meat Popsicle.

To help in said fury dispensing, Midway have seen fit to outfit Torque with such classics as dual .454 revolvers, a sawed-off shotgun, the Thompson auto-rifle (better known as the Tommy gun), Molotov cocktails, and the unique ability to morph into a monster of Hulk-sized proportions that makes cutting swathes through the enemy ranks look like dicing carrots with a samurai sword.

Of course, it's not as easy as just hitting a button and then going on to defeat the evil, save the princess and get home in time for Mother's famed apple pie and icecream, oh no.

You have to fill up the 'rage' meter first, which entails first killing a whole bunch of nasties, and then being very careful when you decide to go bananas, because staying too long in monster form leads to your health dropping like a grand piano down a flight of concrete stairs.

So, it's a trade-off, but still very helpful when things are looking grim and there isn't much ammo left in the old Boomstick.

Look - it's the big Kahuna! And he's shopping
for high heels?! Die Kahuna, die by axe blade!

Graphically, The Suffering is a mixed bag, but the attention paid to dynamic lighting/shadows (beautiful) and pixel shaders (also beautiful) means that the occasional sub-par texture or model can be more easily forgiven.

The game looks good where and when it counts, and has made the jump to PC much better than some recent console efforts (Crazy Taxi 3, I ask you?).

The same can be said for the audio, which occasionally takes a turn for the worse as far as the voice acting goes, but truth be told, some of the those B-grade voices felt oddly suitable.

The script, while somewhat clichéd, still manages to be believable and definitely doesn't pull punches when it comes to profanity.

It's a prison full of hardened inmates waiting for the needle, and, as such, they put the 'profane' back into profanity. Musically, Torque and Co. get a big green tick for providing tunes that get you in the mood but never become so overt as to be distracting.

Moving on, I've talked about atmosphere before, but I'll mention it again here, just in case you missed my ranting and raving wonderfully constructed prose the first time around. While The Suffering does occasionally lack polish, the thing it does not lack is bucket loads of personality.

It's an easy game to get into and also one to be easily disturbed by, much like Silent Hill, and, again like Silent Hill, you are absorbed by it and are compelled to play through to the end. It suspends one's disbelief, and that is more than I can say for a lot of the current Hollywood blockbusters.

For those with a solid grip on reality and a need for demon blasting, this could be just the ticket, with guns, gore, insanity, swear words, three alternate endings and a hero sporting honest-to-God sideburns.

Just don't get any blood on the keyboard, that's sick.

Game: The Suffering
Players: 1
Online: No
Developer: Midway

Rating: 80%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

The Suffering is on the shelves now.

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