The Suffering: Ties That Bind [PS2]

Some games, regardless of the final scores, are necessary -- they benefit their genre as a whole, stretch out the corners that are starting to crinkle in. The Suffering, released a year or so ago, was definitely such a game, bringing full-on die-hard ass-kicking and a tsunami of profanity back to "survival horror," which was starting to get just a weensy bit too, well, demure. Things aren't quite so definite with its new sequel, Ties That Bind, which keeps most of the good stuff and runs with it in a new direction... but only a new direction.

The "good" news: Our anti-hero Torque has gotten the hell off Carnate Island and its (literally) damned prison. The bad news: "the hell" has not only gotten off the island with him, but it's followed him home to Baltimore to overrun the streets.

Where The Suffering was thick with claustrophobia and goth-levels of isolation, Ties That Bind offers urban environs that have at least the false ghost of normality, and it changes the feel a little.

The overall enemy bestiary hasn't changed terribly much. Many of the baddies from the first game modeled on various methods of prison execution -- the death-by-injection needle freaks, for example -- surface here again, with a new karmic "do" to represent the evils of the inner city. It's actually a good idea -- but coming as it does so soon on the trail of the original, the player can't help but feel a little like the dad who got a funny tie again this year for Father's Day.

Thankfully, the core violent action is still here in buckets. Torque has access to all kinds of guns, assault weapons, shotguns, and crude, improvised urban whacking devices. This Baltimore-dweller also has -- who'da thunk it -- rocket launchers and launchers for different varieties of grenades.

This might sound like a strange thing to praise, but Torque is a little more... fragile this time around. The game throws both single heavy-duty foes and occasional waves of unexpected attackers at you at such queerly timed intervals that it's easy to get complacent after handing out a few beat-downs in a row. Then you round the next corner, and have your ass instantaneously carved up, heavily salted, and handed to you.

The result? There's a lot of real, tangible fear of one's own untimely demise; it helps to offset the familiarity of both the general enemy population and the new environments. All of Torque's weapons, too, have some real downsides:

The pistols are just... lame. For all the good they do, and for all the audiovisual kick they possess, you might as well be emptying one of those old plastic disc-guns into an attacker. Your automatic weapon option isn't much better, unless you're double-wielding, and even then you'll go through a lot of spent casings before you drop what-the-hell is charging and shrieking at you.

The designers seem to have gone out of their way to make real boom makers like the rocket launcher a dicey proposition, thanks to many confined areas... you get the idea. It ups the fear factor, but some players will resent it. Oh, and your health-pill-packing capacity is revoked, too! Enjoy!

So why is this game still getting four stars? Because it is deeply, deeply screwed up, and that's what we're all here for. If you don't like being suddenly locked into a room and buried in what seems like 18,000 godawful things, then -- to paraphrase the old doctor joke -- stay out of that room. You will hear combinations of profane words here that, honestly, may never have occurred to you before. If you don't like that, you can [expletive deleted] yourself with a [expletive deleted] roto-tiller until it comes out the end of your [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted]. Seriously.

It's linear, but you likely won't have much time to worry about that -- there are some truly inspired moments of dementia, where the state of Torque's sanity starts to call yours into question (particularly if you haven't played the original). What is that thing coming at me, and why won't it die? What did that voice just say, and am I in trouble if I don't know?

Bald fact: Ties That Bind does feel, on some levels, like a bit of a retread through familiar territory. But it's good territory (well, very, very bad, in this case), and enough of the original's dark charm has survived to make even Carnate Island vets want to settle a spell in Baltimore. Or die trying.