Review by: Tony Mitera

When you take its status as a movie game into account you would expect a SAW game to be almost as traumatic as anything the maniacal Jigsaw could string up. The game is certainly filled with broken pieces of rusted mechanics, both in the tangible as well as the metaphorical sense, which you must endure though to proceed. That being said the game wraps the franchise around a survival horror setting better than any sane person would have expected. It’s really not that bad.

In the game you play as a homicide cop tasked with tracking down and bringing Jigsaw to justice. After being shot in the street and knocked unconscious you awake in a dingy bathroom inside of an abandoned insane asylum. The bullet that pierced your chest has been surgically removed, and a key was placed inside of your body before you were sewn up. Your goal of bringing Jigsaw down hasn’t changed, but the rules of the game certainly have as you must explore the asylum and overcome a wide variety of sinister traps.

Making matters interesting is that the asylum is filled with a host of other people captured by Jigsaw, who have all been informed about the key contained inside of your body and of how it will unlock the facility and let them escape. Fighting off these maniacs who are hell bent on ripping into your torso is best done with a weapon, though weapons themselves break after a small amount of beatings have been delivered. Combat is simplistic to a fault and boils down to little more than just beating the enemy down, though occasionally a timed event is triggered that shows you beating the crap out of the enemy if the indicated buttons are pushed with the correct timing.

At one point in the game your character gets a metal collar attached to his neck, which is outfitted with a ring of shotgun shells pointing inward. Some enemies that you find have similar collars, but yours and theirs differ in how they are wired. When your collar and theirs get anywhere near each other they both activate and begin to beep, and while yours speeds up in its beeping the closer you are to the enemy theirs slows down. Thus, once you have spotted the enemy you must either outrun them or kill them quickly, but in either case putting distance between your two collars so that you aren’t the one who has their head blown off.

Surviving the smaller traps boils down to either pushing the right reaction button for traps that you couldn’t have spotted or disarming the ones you could have before triggering them. Any trap that you disarm gives you the traps components, which then lets you rearm the trap at will and take out any enemy who blindly crosses it. Some doors can be shut and bolted from one side, which means that it is possible to funnel enemies down a trapped passageway and let them off themselves without putting yourself in direct danger.

Larger traps usually revolve around a puzzle or a test of endurance, such as rewiring a fuse box before bombs in the room explode or digging around in a toilet filled with used drug addict syringes to grab a key before you pass out from the pain. Not all puzzles are timed, but for the ones that are you will usually find digital countdown clocks everywhere you look counting down how much time you have left. Set-piece puzzles are found at the end of every chapter, which are more elaborate in the fact that not only are you under the gun to find the solution but you must do so or another person will die in a typically horrific manner. These puzzles are usually just hard enough to have you fail them once or twice, letting you view the cutscene showing what failure means for one or both of you before you figure it out and move on.