Reviews// Forbidden Siren 2 (PS2)

This is particularly infuriating, as the game tends to ‘mother’ you a lot at the start of it. Possibly the scariest thing in the whole game, the first ‘level’ purely consists of you opening a door and walking down stairs to complete your mission. No, don’t congratulate us; it’s all a measure of skill. Before you start a stage, you’re given various hints to help you survive. Fair enough. When you start the level, the bottom of the screen constantly gives you objective markers, leading you step by step to the mission goal. It does get rather patronising and rather soul-sapping, as the first ten stages all tend to be really short, basic tasks. ‘Escape from x Place’; ‘Get to the x Vehicle’; ‘Escape the tyrants with x Person’. See what we mean?

The gameplay only gets better after you’ve slogged through the tedium and let the game hold your hand for several levels. The stages expand and no longer take just two minutes to complete, the missions are more complex to fulfil and the whole game gets a bit more entertaining. The stages are still relatively short, but you get to play a wide array of characters with different methods of playing the game. Each stage also has two different missions, with the second involving harder, more involved objectives. You can pick up various ‘Archive’ material (some of which unlock extra missions for certain stages). This is ideal for completists. However, the second mission for each level, despite still not being any great shakes, fares better than the original missions, oddly enough.

Still, there is some fun to be had here. Using a clever ability called ‘sightjacking’, your character can use their mind like a television aerial, tuning into other people’s sight and seeing from their point of view. This can be handy for when you need to evade enemies, as you’ll be literally seeing through their eyes as they patrol certain parts of the level.

A great stage we played sampling this involved playing as a blind guy and using his guide dog to escape the island, using the canine’s point of view. Inspiring level premises like these were few and far between, which is a shame because it could have really made a case for inventive stage design – the sightjacking was mostly used as a means to avoid capture or to clear basic puzzles by seeing through other people’s eyes.

While enjoyable on some levels, the initial tedium and missed opportunity with the unique gameplay features makes us wonder if perhaps people will be willing to play past the first ten stages to get to the good bits of the game. Not exactly a cult horror smash, but rather one of those perverse B-Movies that get popular for quite incomprehensible reasons.


SPOnG Score: C+

Forbidden Siren 2 doesn’t exactly set the house on fire. It’s competent at providing an eerie story that is likely to scare the bejesus out of the weak of mind. There’s a lot of scope here for replayability through the extra missions, but we feel that the extra missions should probably have been the main levels in the first place, as they appear to be much better thought-out than the drab, 'run-to-location-or-pick-up-item' originals. If you’ve played the first game, there’s nothing here that will warrant the purchase of this sequel. An above-average game that can be entertaining to watch and play, but you have to work for it.