The series is notorious for its well-crafted story, characters and unbelievably scary moments, and thankfully much of this is left untouched. Forbidden Siren 2 has you playing through the perspective of several characters as in the original game, trying to unravel the mysteries behind a Japanese island that has a scary past filled with demonic creatures and spirits. Players can expect to play out the story at different time zones and locations that’ll eventually intertwine with one another in some form. There are different personas that you’ll play as throughout the game, ranging from a nervous young male, a military officer, a young schoolgirl and an ageing police officer.
The variation between the characters offers a lot of flexibility in how each section is played out and told. For instance, playing as the schoolgirl will require you to sneak around avoiding all enemies, meanwhile playing as the military officer will require you to be more offensive. It’s an intriguing feature, and ultimately works to the games advantage since the game maintains a steady flow of freshness and variety to keep gamers interested. Due to this variety, you’ll begin each level differently. Some characters are very frail and progress through their levels by hiding and using no weapons at all, while there are others that use weapons or just escort other characters to their destination.
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One of the key features in the game is the sight-jack feature, which allows gamers to see through the eyes of their enemies or allies. Acting like a TV, you’ll be able to alternate between views that’ll help you progress through levels by knowing enemy positions and sight-jacking certain characters will assist you during puzzles, such as sight-jacking enemies to find out a keycode or sight-jacking someone to reveal hidden items.
Unfortunately though, most of these positives are hit hard with a lot of shortcomings. Depending on where you stand, the constant jumping between characters and different stories can eventually confuse you on why someone is on the island and what their purpose is in some levels. In addition, a lot of the levels are very straightforward. In most cases you’ll be traveling from point A to point B, using sight-jack, and perhaps find a few items to unlock puzzles. You’re virtually doing the same mission, but in a different body and scenario. It's very unfortunate too. There's a lot of features used only a few times in the game, but are later left untouched, which could've easily extended the enjoyment of some of the later levels.
There are many aspects in the game that feel a tad dated too, especially when compared to Resident Evil 4. While the two may be two completely different games, there are a lot of gameplay elements that Forbidden Siren 2 could’ve benefited from. One feature of particular note is the controls. Most survival-horror fans would be familiar with the slow and awkward movement used in early Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. Unfortunately, Forbidden Siren 2 still maintains this very cumbersome and dated structure. It makes moving your character around difficult and aiming even worse. It’s hard to get a precise shot on an enemy from a distance and just moving your character around is a very frustration experience.
Quickly now, we're almost there.
One of the most annoying features in the game for us was the fact you had to replay levels to progress further in the game. Much like the original, where you had to go back to levels to find items to unlock levels, in Forbidden Siren 2 you must first complete the ‘mission 1’ setting of a level, and later on, come back and finish the ‘mission 2’ setting. Rather than extending the levels, and placing you where you last finished, you must repeat the entire level, which is left virtually unchanged. Besides some differently placed enemies and having a different final objective, gamers will go through the same passage of play. It’s a useless feature, and seems like a complete waste of time that could’ve been spent on extending the story and levels.
In addition, the game suffers from one or two very minor errors that result in a poor finish. For some reason the zombies are able to shoot at you perfectly from a distance, never missing a shot. However, you aren’t so lucky. The aiming is dreadful, and trying to position your gun is a little too sensitive. This means that you unfortunately will have to run around trying to avoid bullets and zombies before engaging in combat, since trying to shoot at enemies becomes an impossible process. These things are just unnecessary for the game and positions this game way, way behind the rest.
On a graphical standpoint, Forbidden Siren 2 has its moments of glory, as well as its moments of shame. The settings for each level are very well crafted; the dark and creepy locations highlight just how atmospheric this game can be. A lot of the cut-scenes sport some very nice graphics, with some splendid facial expressions. However, in the main game the animation takes a massive hit. When running with your character they seem like robots, and there are some of those famous PlayStation2 jaggies that appear from time to time.
One full can of beans.
The audio seems a little better than the last Forbidden Siren game though, thankfully. The voice acting seems much better this time round, which tend to suit the characters a bit better too. Some gamers may be glad to hear that they’ve also added an option to choose the original Japanese voiceovers with subtitles. Even when something does go right for Sony, they manage to bugger this feature up also. Sometimes the subtitles don’t actually match the words spoken. But hey, they tried. The music does create a very creepy atmosphere for the game, and we’ll admit that there were times that we jumped out of our seat due to the unexpectedness of it all.
Forbidden Siren 2 suffers a similar fate to the original. There are a lot of fantastic ideas and features presented, but are clouded by the unforgivable errors. After playing a game like Resident Evil 4 it’s strange that a game in the same genre will maintain a control setup that has been heavily criticised over the last decade - not to mention that there are far too many errors that make the entire game feel very tedious and cumbersome. Aside from this though, Forbidden Siren 2 is the only noteworthy title of its genre for some time and might fill the void for some.
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