It was only a few weeks ago that Gathering of Developers and Terminal Reality released Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr, an adventure that managed to scare this reviewer right out of his pants. Not long after releasing Rune, an excellent 3rd person action adventure, Human Head Studios has delivered the second Blair Witch title, Blair Witch Volume 2: The Legend of Coffin Rock, based upon the mysterious rock location in the woods near Burkitsville, Maryland where supposedly the search team for Robin Weaver was ritualistically murdered before their bodies disappeared. Your character suddenly awakens from the whispering of a little girl, Robin Weaver. You have a nasty blow to the head that’s taken away all of your memories, but Robin takes you to her grandmother, where she begins treating your wounds. As you sleep, you start to have flashbacks that provide insight into what happened before being found by Robin, and after regaining enough strength to get out of bed, Robin’s grandmother tells you have Robin has gone missing. Naming you Lazarus for the time being, she asks that as payment for her services, you try and look for her.

All of the Blair Witch titles have and are being created using Terminal Reality’s Nocturne engine, and given the nature of all three games, it works out beautifully. The backgrounds for the game have been made pre-rendered, and while this does provide a bit of a static, stale feeling, the backgrounds are full of detail and absolute creepiness, despite the fact that more than 90% of them take place in the woods. There are times when it can become somewhat confusing to navigate all the different paths, and the camera being non manipulative can make battle difficult sometimes, but overall it works out well. The characters are polygon-based models that look good, but have a few problems. For one, the facial movements of all the characters consist of two simple animations of mouth open and mouth closed that don't match up with the speech dialogue. And secondly, the Nocturne engine allows the character’s clothes to flap as if the wind were hitting them, but what usually ends up occurring is an entirely unnatural effect where the clothes violently whip back and forth.

If you’ve played Resident Evil, you won’t have much trouble jumping right into Blair Witch Volume 2: The Legend of Coffin Rock; the controls are similar in many respects. Using the normal keypad, the character can strafe left and right, move forward and move backward. The turning and shooting parts are accomplished using the mouse. It takes a little time to become used to the controls, especially finding the right turning speed, but after taking out a few zombie dogs, the control will become second nature. Gamers having trouble with the keyboard-mouse scheme do have some other options (gamepad, mouse only, keyboard only), but the keyboard-mouse combination is easily the best of each world.

In order to help the less experienced games, the Nocturne engine has the addition of the auto-aiming feature that will target enemies as soon as they’re in range. While it does take much of the challenge away from the action sequences in the game, considering that many times it’s impossible to attack the enemy properly because of the camera angles not showing them from a decent angle, the auto-aiming is sometimes a must. There are some disadvantages to using auto-aiming, though; it has a problematic time picking out what it wants to shoot when there is more than one enemy. Often the cursor will start randomly switching from one target to the other, and many times aiming entirely off target, causing Lazarus to take an unwanted hit or wasting ammunition.

Even though the Blair Witch series is only $20 for each game, it is disappointing that from start to finish, the game can be completed in a matter of hours. Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr easily takes at least seven hours to complete (making it a game that you wouldn’t finish in out sitting), while Human Head’s effort takes, even after thoroughly searching each area for items, no more than four or five hours. If you rush through the game, it could take even less than that. The main problem is that there no section where the player has to be worried that he or she is being too careless with their items; there are always new sets of bullets and Twana stick figures (health) around the corner. At the end of the game, I still had over 50 rounds of bullets and 8 Twana sticks left. In fact, the hardest part of the game is the first hour, where you haven’t run into much ammunition or Twana sticks yet. Additionally, the game’s ending is very disappointing, and doesn’t explain what happened. It’s one thing to leave certain information out to make it up the player to figure out what’s happening, but all it does here is leave you confused and wondering if you somehow received the “bad” ending.

One of the aspects that made The Blair Witch Project such an immersive movie was the use of creepy sounds that sent a sharp, shivery chill down your spine. Human Head, like Terminal Reality did with the first title, has done an incredible job of taking sounds that wouldn’t even make you think twice make you flip on the lights and put the game on pause for a few moments. Rocks smack together, footsteps crunch over leaves in the distance, a girl alternates between crying and laughing – all of them are skillfully placed a points where they will be the most effective. Heck, the sound was enough to even give me slight goosebumps as I was playing through it before night fell. Make sure you have a decent sound system to experience the game, or at least pop on some headphones, and the sound will have you feeling like you’re actually tromping through the woods of Burkitsville in no time.

When taken as a whole, Blair Witch Volume 2: The Legend of Coffin Rock doesn’t provide as many scares or value as the Rustin Parr installment did, but it’s still worth the measly $20 that it costs; it will, at the least, make you jump up in your seat a few times.