Reader reviews for Still Life 2 page 2

When a reporter following the case (Paloma Hernandez) is kidnapped it leads to a desperate hunt for leads and a desperate battle for survival.

You control both Vic and Paloma at various stages in the game. Vic’s segments are mostly investigation stages where you swab, scan, spray and analyse about a million blood stains and finger prints in every room in the house. (The one and only location in the game).

Paloma’s sections are inspired by the movie “Saw” as you are trapped by the killer and have to jump through various traps and puzzles in the vain hope of finding your way out.

Tension in the Paloma sections is higher and more fast paced than the Vic sections and unfortunatly include some pretty annoying timed sections. (You can die in this game).

While the Vic sections are more laid back this flips around towards the end of the game when the various plots all come together into a frenzied ending.

Graphically the game is rough. Animations are stilted, the 3D models basic and the mouth movements rarely approximate the speech. I prefered the 2.5D style of the first games. The 3D environments lack the atmosphere of the previous game, looking very sparse in comparison.

The puzzles are ok, but I felt there seemed to be far too many of the collection and analysing tasks that didn’t seem to go anywhere. I was collecting a lot of fingerprints and blood samples of the various victims, but there wasn’t much of a pay off. Especially as you already know where Paloma’s fingerprints etc would have been as you played that part already. On the Paloma side there was more of a puzzly nature to the tasks. Unfortunatly it decided that Resident Evil was a model inventory system and included a finite slot system and chest/closets to store items. This causes a fair bit of backtracking and swapping of items.

Plot wise the game is aiming for a Se7en meets Saw kind of vibe and for the most part the story is pretty decent. It’s not as deep as the historical based previous game and is more modern/mainstream in it’s approach. However it keeps the tension and plot twists going for most of the game. My biggest issue with the game is that unlike the previous game which felt unfinished, this game has one too many twists in the tail and over stays it’s welcome by a good hour. As Paloma says at one point “OMG will this never end”.

It also decides to weave into this new killer story some flashbacks to wrap up the loose ends from the previous game. It seems out of place and uses a tenuous method to trigger the flashback.

Finally the most annoying thing about the game is the over powering music which drowns out the speech at times in the game.

Overall it has it’s moments with it’s intersting take on the serial killer genre, but looks rough and overstays it’s welcome.