The teen horror movie has become a genre of its own in the past few years, with the superb Scream sparking off a host of movies based around today's youth, such as Jeepers Creepers, Final Destination, Wrong Turn, Cabin Fever and Long Time Dead, to name but a few. And if there was ever a genre that should transfer smoothly to the gaming world, this is it - a bunch of high school kids uncovering something horrific, dying off one by one as the mystery deepens and the twists unfold. So enter ObsCure, the game that puts the scary in secondary. Sorry.

The opening of ObsCure is full of promise - a nicely animated cut scene that plays like the introduction to a movie, ending with your character, Kenny, left alone in the sports hall. The others have gone - Kenny decided to stay back and shoot a few hoops before (gasp!) going into the locker room alone! Noooo! Kenny, you fool, that's a classic horror movie mistaken!! Didn't you ever watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?! Once into the locker room, your phone rings - it's your girlfriend asking where you are. While you're placating her, some shady character who we only get a glimpse of, makes off with your backpack. So you chase him out of the sports hall and into a rather spooky garden, with a ramshackle old house, just behind the school. You enter a cellar and hear strange noises coming from a ladder, Grabbing a nearby gun and taping a torch to it (hmm, handy), you head down into the darkness.

Once down in the cellar, it's all very foreboding. Strange plant-like roots with a fuzzy, black cloud of shadows around them have pushed through the corridor walls and something unnatural skitters across the corridor ahead of you, running between holes in the root-infested walls. You head through a couple of ramshackle rooms until you find a very ill-looking kid, locked in a cell. This guy is seriously pale and skinny; he look's like he's on death's door. He tells you that you have to get out of the basement and offers to show you the way. Taking a gun from a nearby cabinet, he joins your team and now you can swap between him and Kenny at will. Making your way back through an eerie room full of cages of varying sizes and strange objects, a door bursts off its hinges and into the room, almost knocking you down, as a mutated, freaky creature lumbers out. You shine your torch on the thing to weaken it and shoot it, but there's another one behind you! And then you die.

I replayed this opening section several times and it's not actually possible to survive! I managed to run past the beasts, with my friend shooting them to hold them at bay, whilst I pushed a crate out of the way, which was now blocking the door, and then got back into the corridor, my companion behind me killed by the pursuing fiend. Vicious little mutant dog things swarmed around as I ran, full-pelt, for the ladder at the end of the corridor, but just as I began climbing up, someone above closed the hatch and sealed me in! Then the credits roll, just like this was the opening scene for a movie, which is a great touch.

Kenny's absence doesn't go unnoticed - his sister Shannon is worried when Kenny's girlfriend, Ashley, says that he didn't show up last night; Shannon had assumed that Kenny slept over at her place. Their friend, Josh, who has journalistic tendencies, is intrigued by this disappearance and so the three of them stay back after school to look for clues to Kenny's whereabouts, managing to get themselves locked in the student lounge, which is where the game proper begins.

ObsCure is pretty standard survival horror fare in many respects, although it does introduce a couple of nifty features. The first is the way you play through the game with five different characters, switching between the available characters at will. The next is the team dynamic - you can take two characters along wherever you go, switching between control of them at any time while the other one is controlled competently by the AI. This is very handy, as there are many occasions when you're assaulted by disgusting mutants from multiple directions, so you need someone to watch your back. The game can be quite tough - I wasn't far in before I found myself with four badly wounded characters and only a couple of health drinks between us. After this I was a bit more trigger happy, worrying more about health conservation than ammo!

Another great feature is the co-operative mode - a second player can dive into the action at any point and take control of the other team mate. You can choose which character the camera focuses on and you automatically move rooms when one of you enters a door. It's great fun to play with a friend, rather than having to rely on the admittedly very effective AI to control your buddy, adding value to the experience. The fact that your friend can leave at any point, handing character control back to the game, is also a bonus. This is a cool feature and one that I'm sure will be used by other games in the future. At least I hope it will.

The gameplay is a good mixture of puzzle solving and action, as you work your way around the various sections of the school (and the inevitable network of tunnels in the huge basement beneath it) searching for clues, finding ways to access locked areas and collecting objects that you need to solve puzzles, while being attacked pretty frequently by a reasonable variety of freaky creatures. You've got your zombies, who are more 28 Days Later than Resident Evil. They're pretty creepy actually, as they look quite normal from behind, sitting or even standing still, then they spot you and rush swiftly at you, growling and swiping. Then there's the little two-legged mutant dog things, which are squat little biting beasts, plus creatures that slither along the ceiling and reach down to ensnare you. Soon the regular zombies begin mutating into much larger and tougher beasts, which take a lot of firepower to kill and are lethal if they get a couple of blows in. And that's not to mention the massive, bloated female mutant that lays loads of scuttling insects every few seconds - a disgusting mutation worthy of Resident Evil, for sure!

While the game sticks closely to the classic Resident Evil formula, another nice feature is that light is fatal to the creatures. There are occasions when you have to smash classroom windows (the game starts before nightfall) to let the sunlight in and kill the creatures, or at the very least drive them away. It's such a relief when there's light streaming in through the windows - you feel safe and relaxed, if only for a little while. Once it gets dark, or in place where no light is available, you must make strategic usage of your torch to weaken your foes. You can tape the various torches you find to the pistols and shotguns you get hold of (it's an American high school remember!) and then shine as you shoot. Each torch has an intensity mode, where it shines extra brightly, but only for a few seconds, as a bar fills up until the torch overheats and you have to wait a few more seconds for it to go back down again. This introduces an element of strategy to the shooting, as you prioritise what to spotlight first. It's also wise to shine your light on whatever your teammate is shooting, as the creature dies quicker and you conserve that precious ammo.

The weapons are nice to use, the pistols are good and the shotguns superb, with great blood splattering effects as you blast away. You do get a grenade launcher near the end too and handy light grenades, but there's not a massive variety to the guns. What is great, however, is when you get hold of an iron rod or baseball bat - whacking zombies to death is hilarious, as is the fact that you can use the bat to smash in vending machines, windows and other things! Come on, admit it, who hasn't wanted to just get a baseball bat and smash the crap out of that vending machine that took your money and then didn't drop the crisps down?! It feels extra naughty because you're at school, too!

The level designs are well done, as most areas have a good mix of puzzles and monsters lurking around, with a couple of things in some areas that you'll come back to later when you have the right item. Puzzles are pretty simple, mostly involving putting objects into place, although a couple of them might tax you for a little while. You can also combine items occasionally, as part of the puzzle solving process and you get hold of a lockpick, for finding extra goodies hidden in lockers or cabinets, as well as opening some doors.

Each of the five characters has a unique ability that comes in useful, although none of them are essential to complete the game. This means that characters can be killed off and you can still keep playing - you can finish the game with only one of the five left if you like, or you can attempt to keep everyone alive against all the odds. Anyway, these abilities vary in usefulness - Shannon will give you a vague hint about what to do in any given room, Stan (who comes in a bit later) can pick locks in double time and Ashley has a special attack move. By far the best ability is Josh - who can tell you whether or not there is anything useful left in any room, thanks to his innate sense for clues and useful items. This is a fantastic bonus and meant that I kept Josh around all the time - no more endless hunting around pressing action and hoping to pick something up, Resident Evil style!

The graphics in ObsCure are nothing amazing but they're slick enough and very stylish. The high school is a hundred years old and so has grand architecture, which looks great and sets the atmosphere brilliantly. Indeed, the school almost has more personality than the kids, who are never really developed as characters, perhaps a drawback of allowing any of them to be killed off at any point. The environments are highly detailed, with objects strewn all around, buildings half-destroyed by mutant invasion and lovely lighting effects. If you play this in the dark at night, it creates definite tension and while there aren't that many big scares, it will keep you on edge as you try to anticipate that next attack. The monsters are detailed and fairly well animated, as are the kids, although again they're not outstanding. The camera angles, while pre-determined and either fixed or scrolling, Resi style, are very well done and the controls and movement aren't as clunky as the old Resi games, meaning that you'll rarely get stuck or feel frustrated that you can't see the bad guys.

The sound is good too - nice ambient effects like echoing footsteps and creepy sounds in the background, good monster noises, solid gunfire and so on. The musical score complements the gameplay well, building tension nicely and then increasing in tempo for the action-packed moments when you're assaulted by mutant forces.

The story is possibly the weakest part of ObsCure - it's as cliché as you can get, taking a leaf straight out of Resident Evil's books with a tail of a madman experimenting with some genetic material of indeterminate source (you get enough information to decide where this plague originates from though), resulting in the creation of mutants that break out of their containment and begin to contaminate the whole school. The main bad guy (it's obvious from the start who it is but I won't spoil it) is the strongest character and through the newspaper clippings, research notes and letters that you discover, his origins and motivations slowly unfold, with a narrative that just about retains your interest, or at least curiosity. It was enough to entice me to complete the game anyway, which I did in well under ten hours, so don't expect anything massive, although survival horror games aren't known for their length (CODE Veronica notwithstanding!) The end of game boss is suitably huge and grotesque, making for a tough, if formulaic, conclusion to the story.

ObsCure is a solid survival horror game that takes the classic formula and adds a couple of cool innovations. It's more of an upgrade than an evolution, but the American high school setting feels fresh and is very well put together, with smooth graphics, a nice balance of shooting and exploration and a story that, while very generic, just about holds your attention. It's a little reminiscent of classic sci-fi horror movie The Faculty (Stan's character and appearance is the spitting image of Josh Hartnett's character from that movie!) in its style and while it's by no means a classic, it'll provide a few hours of entertainment to fans of the genre. Actually, there's an idea, The Faculty is perfect game material and if it turned out as good as The Thing, which is the first place to go for a survival horror fix on Xbox, it'd be awesome! Games developers take note…

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).