Skip to content
Dom Robinson reviews
Midway 
- Price: £39.99
- Players: 1
- Widescreen: No
- 60Hz: No
- DTS sound: No
The basic premise about The Sufferingis that you’re a prisoner scheduled for execution for some reason. However,everyone else in the penitentiary already seems to be dead, so surely itshould be a straight-forward walk in the park to escape to freedom? Not so.
The place is full of the ghosts of previously-executed bad guys and they’lldo their level best to stop you… or such is the plan. The blurb for thisgame makes it sound like anything and everything could happen when you comeface-to-face against the enemy – so why does the same thing keep happening?
So, what could possibly go wrong with it to make you feel like you’re sufferingfor having bought it? Well, you get the impression thatwhen you start to break out of jail, you’ll be up against creatures that arenot of this earth, but there’s only a handful of different ones and this soonbecomes repetitve, despite the fact that one of them has a nice line injumping up onto the ceiling and scuttling about spider-like. However, he’lldrop down to the ground again and you can easily continue to shoot him ortwat him again with whatever you’re carrying. Job done.
Often you’ll come across locked doors all round, but supposed tension willbe added by something weaving its tentacles about and ripping the door offit’s hinges for you to walk through. You know that you’ll be able to carryon without being caught up in those as they’re just there for effect… so,not much of an effect then.
As for complexity, this doesn’t even begin to have that. I thought I wascornered in one room early on as I walked into the room with a gas chamber.The main door locked behind me… the gas chamber door opened… theroom started to fill with gas… but as the baddie had smashed a window toget to me (despite him being a ghost!), I could quickly dash through the holeand bugger off.
On the plus side, you can save whenever you like, in addition to the frequentcheckpoints, and also shoot the limbs off some of the baddies, but you cando that in a number of other games that have come before.
You can pick up weapons and power-ups along the way, there are nine levels, but given that there’s just one set path here, the gameplay is far too linear.The dull graphics make it look like an old Playstation game and as you runabout, your character lurches about like he’s got rickets.
Oh, and you have an ‘insanity meter’ which is like turning into the Hulkwhen you get angry – and that doesn’t just happen when the fuckwits at thepost office card you when you’re out, and then shut up shop before you gethome from work(!)
The Suffering is just a poor man’sManhunt.Buy that. It’s great. You can have a gun if you want.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.