Silent Hill: Homecoming

"A title everyone should at least try out."

Imagine if Resident Evil 4's game play, Silent Hill 2's story, Silent Hill 4's focus on melee combat, and the Silent Hill movie's style of the town somehow all got together and formed a child. That child would be Silent Hill: Homecoming.

This may make the title sound like a bad thing, but it's not. It's actually all works together to form a very solid game. While this isn't the best title of the series and won't spin heads of people who consider the original trilogy (especially 2) a great piece of art, it is still worth your time to at least play through a bit of it to see how someone else looks at the game.

Graphics: I'm sadly going to have to say that the graphics are not very impressive. The textures of characters are a little choppy (even on HD), the world and colors are a little awkward and overall I can probably say that this may just look like a really good Xbox game. So while it isn't terrible, it isn't great either. But I assume the reason this probably is could be because of how massive each of the areas are. Unlike previous games, Silent Hill: Homecoming has massive level areas. No longer must we have the torture of constantly having to load rooms in hospitals and schools. Everything is already loaded up and ready to explore. Granted there are still loading times (and a lot of the time they're a bit long) there's a lot to explore in areas that make the loading happen not very often.

Sound: 1 man to say about this: Akira Yamaoka. For those who don't know, he is the sound and music composer for the previous Silent Hill games. His work suits this game just as well, mixing from soft rock tracks and horrific tunes to really give it that Silent Hill feel.

Story: The story of Silent Hill: Homecoming is nothing like an epic tale out of an RPG with many twists, enemies and dialog but that doesn't mean that it is a bad game. For those who are interested in what the story is about (you may skip this italic part if you don't wish to know about it), the game starts off with the character named Alex who is returning home from the hospital. His home is not in Silent Hill itself, but another town near Silent Hill “Shepard's Glen.” Though things aren't right with the town as he notices that everyone has gone missing and the town is infested with monsters. So he seeks out to find his little brother and escape the town as soon as possible.

Sad to say though the story later down the line becomes a little predictable as to what happens and what may be coming up. There are still moments that could very depressing to watch though that I will refuse to spoil, and although as I said it becomes a little predictable down the line, it's still a great story that's told very well.

Game play: The core of the game as every one knows. Silent Hill: Homecoming introduces a new combat game play that really focuses more on survival rather than “stand 20 feet away from mob while you fire all your pistol/shotgun/rifle rounds into enemy while it slowly walks towards you.” Enemies now don't hesitate to slaughter you. Rather than point and shoot, or stand and swing, the combat has been changed to watch enemies moves, dodge and strike with combos of light and heavy attacks at the right moment or be knocked down and have your health beaten away. Fire arms also no longer give you an advantage over every enemy in the game because ammo in this game is very limited and you no longer point directly at the target and fire away. It has changed to a Resident Evil 4 over the shoulder style aiming and with how quickly enemies move and twitch around in this game, you'll have a fun time trying to really get any head shots off in this. In fact, it's probably best to not even use the fire arms in this game due to how limited ammo can be and it would be wasted on regular enemies that you end up facing. Over all the game play has had some changes to it, and while it could use some tweaking (such as most people complain about, inverted aiming and camera control and a 180 turn button) it works out very well and doesn't feel as broken as it does in Silent Hill: 0rigins.

Fear factor: If you're not sure where I am going with this part; I'm basically going to explain how scary the game is. It is rather sad to say that this game doesn't give you the same amount of fear that you'd probably normally have gotten from the first 1 Silent Hill games. Somehow the fear of something popping up out of nowhere, or going down hallways and random noises happening didn't happen in my experience with the game. I've played every Silent Hill game to from when the PS1 game came out, so some might say that I have grown up and out of the Silent Hill scare tactics, I just don't feel the tactics of fear were the same as previous titles. But you could be the judge of that.

Overall Silent Hill: Homecoming is a title that even non Silent Hill fans I feel should check out. I personally myself had my hopes high for this game despite all the negative reviews of top gaming sites and common critiques of fans thinking that this game looks bad because of all the changes it had. I am personally glad to say that while the game did not meet my full expectations, I beat the game satisfied and have plans to complete the game a few more times to unlock the additional content.My only real final complaints about the game are the few bugs that tend to happen (mostly getting occasionally stuck and some scenes not showing correctly, and sometimes when Alex opens a door or checks something out there seems to be a little bit of a stall before he actually does it), the subtitles every now and then go off sync and the story being a bit predictable.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/06/08, Updated 10/07/08

Game Release: Silent Hill: Homecoming (US, 09/30/08)