the ward |

Publisher: Gamecock Media Group

Developer: Renegade Kid

Release Date: 10/26/2007

Available On

Boy, do I love this game? Actually, I hate this game and love it at the same time. This is probably one of the best-looking DS games out there right now. With this FPS survival horror running at 60 FPS, it’s fast, smooth, and very creepy. Yes, the game is actually creepy, kind of like Silent Hill creepy. The game is full of weird monsters, mind-boggling puzzles, and a creepy atmosphere and ambiance.

The game controls really well, but the actual size of the DS makes your wrists cramp up and go numb all the time. If you’ve played Metroid Prime: Hunters, then you know the whole setup, but if you haven’t, then I’ll tell you. You move your reticule around with the stylus, so this feels real and also makes things a lot easier (yeah, PSP!) while you move around with the A, B, X, and Y (if you’re left-handed) or the D-pad (if you’re right-handed). You have your inventory right under your health bar (which is your heart monitor), so you can just touch the weapons you want on the fly, and this makes combat easy and fast.

While the gameplay is pretty straightforward (double tap B or Up to run), you just run around shooting the weird monsters and solving the annoying puzzles. Yes, I said annoying because the hallways all look the same, and it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinthine buildings and hallways with a terrible map and no sense of direction. This is not good since your wrists are cramping and going numb while you hold them in 20 different positions. The map is just a bunch of lines with yellow dots for doors, and there’s no way to tell where you have been. You can write on your notepad and leave notes, but this proves useless for the map and only good for jotting down clues and codes for keypads.

The whole level design is just stupidly annoying, with fallen-over vending machines, desks, chairs, and anything else a hospital has blocking hallways and doors, so you have to find your way around everything. Since you lose track of where you were last, you’ll tear your hair out because of the retarded save system, and this kills the whole game. You’ll spend a good 20 minutes on one level and then die because there are 10 enemies coming after you and you only have 3 bullets. Dying forces you to restart the entire chapter all over again, even when you and the boss fight at the end of the chapter. I really tried loving this game since I absolutely adore survival horror games and I’m very forgiving with them (read my Alone in the Dark review), so I suffered through 5/16 chapters. The thing is, it wasn’t so bad until I picked up the game again four months later and realized why I stopped playing—the retarded save system.

I also really hate how ammo is so scarce in the game when there are so many enemies to fight off; this and the fact that enemies respawn when you re-enter a room means all the ammo you saved up for the boss is now spent on enemies you killed four times already. I don’t know what Gamecock was thinking, but they must not play survival horror games much. Survival horror games need to have really good maps, a way to save clues, no respawning enemies, and a good save system. The whole point is to “survive,” so you have to scrounge what you have around you. This game really shows how to NOT make a survival horror game, so please just consider this before even renting this game.

What made me actually want to like the game is that it looks so amazing and plays so damn well. The game is very creepy, with eerie music and spooky sound effects such as babies crying, water dripping, doors creaking, lightning, thunder, and rain pounding on roofs. The game is also very dark, so you need your trusty flashlight, and this is where the “Doom 3 meets Silent Hill” aspect comes in since you can only either use your flashlight or your gun. Since the DS isn’t very powerful, there’s a black “fog of war” all around you, so when you turn your flashlight off for some reason, you can only see two steps in front of you, but your flashlight can illuminate a 30-foot hall. This is actually a hardware fault and nothing on the developerspart, but you really don’t even notice it. The game’s monsters are very creepy, with zombies that have their chests open up and shoot poison at you, weird creepy things that crawl around the ceilings, nasty slugs that give out high-pitched sonic screams, and really freaky bosses that I can’t even begin to describe. There’s blood all over the walls, broken windows, papers, books, and whatever you can think of thrown everywhere, so the whole place feels deserted and you feel like you’re all alone.

I don’t remember much about the story, but I do remember that you wake up in a hospital and you are trying to find your way out, so it has a Silent Hill feel there. The game also has highly detailed textures and great lighting effects (as I’ve described), like lights (and your flashlight) flickering on and off, and there’s lots of detail in everything. Puzzles are solved by finding papers and clues as to where to find keys and codes, and even by solving certain random puzzles to open boxes, doors, etc. If you want an idea of what the puzzles are like they are exactly like the Silent Hill puzzles we have all grown to hate so you know what to expect. Overall, the game looks and plays great, but the punishing saves system, scarce ammo and health, maze-like hallways, and terrible map ruin this otherwise great survival horror experience.