The Suffering: Ties That Bind

The Suffering Ties is one of those sequels that should be better in every way than the first, the controls are improved, the game has the ability to switch to first person, the graphics are better, there is more weapon variety, more enemy variety, a more focused plot, and the level design is a lot more streamlines and less confusing. But there is one problem holding this game back, despite all these needed improvements, the game has one big flaw. The difficulty is just super unfair and brutal. Now the first game you could have healing items saved up and use them, I think up to 9 at a time, so if you were near death you could just pop a healing item and be fine. In this you can't carry any and only heal by finding pill bottles lying around the environment. Now early on the game is pretty easy, but then about 5 or 6 chapters in the game just becomes brutal and unforgiving and will introduce damage sponge enemies who can kill you in 3 or 4 hits and often there will not be sufficient healing around. There are many enemies who have ranged attacks, there's' a really annoying one that throws fireballs at you and kills you in like 2 hits and is super fast and hard to shoot. The guns in this game just often feel underpowered against the more powerful enemies.

The other issue is some enemies require you to transform to kill and even when transformed the enemies can still hurt you and often will hit you while you're attacking that giving you no chance to dodge. Now I played the game on normal and it was just brutal so I doubt easy is a huge step down. Honestly its amazing people consider games like Dark Souls, Cuphead, and Nioh to be among the hardest games, because this game makes all those games seem like a walk in the part. I would rather go up against the most difficult bosses in those games than any of the difficult encounters in this game. There are many moments the game will just spawn dozens of enemies and you'll need to kill them all with limited healing items so you'll just bash your head against a wall until you get lucky and don't get destroyed.

The problem is difficulty isn't bad when done right, hell the first game was kind of difficult but it was balanced by the ability to store healing items and the ability to run past difficult encounters if you knew where you were going. In this you are forced to fight and enemies will often be unfairly overpowered while your guns just aren't powerful enough to take them out fast. Now had this game allowed you to store healing and made the enemies a bit less tanky and the enemy gauntlets a little less brutal, I would have given this leeway, but the difficulty and frustration just bumps this down below the first game. The first game had problems but the difficulty wasn't really a major one. Its sad because this game fixes every other problem in the first game, but then adds one thats even worse. This game is practically borderline unplayable due to its unfair difficulty and even with save states it still will take dozens of tries if not nearly 100 in the more difficult encounters. If a game is not fun to play I just can't give it a good score, even if it looks nice and has decent design, the difficulty just makes this a chore and unfun to play, and its a shame because everything else about this game is pretty decent, I liked the enemy design, the controls were decent, and some of the areas were cool that you went to, but I just can't enjoy this with the difficulty being too unfair and not even giving the player a chance. There's a difference between artificial and skill based difficulty and this one is 100% artificial just throwing overpowered enemies at you with weak weapons and hardly any healing and enemies that can range attack you and destroy you in less than 5 hits.