"The Suffering" makes a great presentation, but at its core, it's a crappy action game.
User Rating: 6.5 | The Suffering PC
The Suffering makes an unforgettable first impression on you. The setting is a dismal prison island, haunted by the ghosts and demons who have been generated by the island's ugly history of crimes and executions. The game does a great job of playing on this theme. As you play the game, you learn a lot about the island's tumultuous history -- the game suggests that each enemy has spawned from an incident in the past, as if the monsters are trying to get revenge on their former incarcerators. Your main character is Torque, a silent prisoner who seems to be some kind of magnet for all of the prison's torment. He sees ghosts of a mad doctor from the local asylum, a former executioner, and a prisoner who got the electric chair. He also has visions of his murdered family at various points throughout the game. Torque never says anything throughout the game, but he ends up being an excellent main character. Unfortunately, the gameplay for this game isn't very good, and the level design absolutely sucks. The variety of enemies in the game is somewhat low, so the game seems to have made up for it by drawing out the game with all sorts of annoying puzzles and hidden exits. Nothing takes you out of the atmosphere of the game like running around in circles for an hour looking for the box that you have to drag to a certain spot so that you can jump up onto the roof of a building to get past the level. I got really tired of using a walkthrough to play this game, and if it hadn't ended after about 8 hours, I probably would have quit anyways. The game puts throws some really bad battles at you where you have to figure out some stupid, inane trick to win. At one point, the game introduces you to infinitely respawning enemies, and you have to figure out the trick to stop them. This happens frequently, and it just plain sucks. First off, you have to figure out if enemies are respawning infinitely, or if there is just a huge number of them. The first time I ran into this I wasted about a half hour trying to figure out what I was supposed to do (thanks also to a game-stopping bug). These battles come up repeatedly, and sometimes it's clear what you are supposed to do, but other times it's not. I also needed a walkthrough to get past a couple of boss battles. I played this game because I wanted to be scared and shoot at stuff, not try and form a Vulcan mind meld with the developers to figure out what trick I need to win boss battles. But the worst part about the game might be the escort missions. A handful of times in the game, you have to escort some loser for a level or two, and your companion will always run into battle and get slaughtered. Your companions are generally retarded and can't avoid combat, which means constant reloading if you want to complete these missions. Occasionally, there are some moments where the action really comes together. Specifically, when the game throws about four or five enemies at you in a few varieties, and you are forced to do some nifty dodging and quick thinking to defeat them all. At this point, the game stands out as the action game that it should have been. It's too bad that these moments are spoiled by all of the game's frustrations. The game's graphics look very good, all things considered. The enemies, especially, are inspired and animated very smoothly. There is a lot of detail in the game's environments. The audio, for the most part, is very good, especially the sounds of your enemies, and the voice acting. Some of the battle music is great too. However, the weapons sound pretty bad. The revolver sounds extremely unconvincing. I recommend passing on this game. I found it to be more frustrating than fun. Sometimes, it plays like a bad puzzle-based adventure game, and that's not what I am looking for out of a horror-themed action game. 
