Silent Hill: Homecoming

"Silent Hill's alive with the sounds of fighting"

Hello and welcome to my review of Silent Hill 5: Homecoming. The only places you should be seeing this review is gamefaqs.com and associated sites, and my site aitj-co.com/gcsgz5/blog.

First, I want to say that you should not go out and get the strategy guide, as it makes numerous grammatical, spelling, and factual mistakes. Some sections are so incorrect they are more confusing then helpful, whilst others are just plain confounding.

Having said that, I would like to pontificate upon SH5. SH5 was developed by Foundation 9 media and Double Helix and released in the US on September 30 for the PS3 and XBOX 360. The games visual style is quite impressive and makes decent use of the power of these systems. I will be reviewing the PS3 version, since that's what I played. The XBOX 360 version should not be much different, though.

The backgrounds are absolutely stunning, and the enemies are rendered fluidly and beautifully. Unfortunately, the humans are just the opposite. Travis, from SH0 (PS2) was better rendered and more articulated then Alex, our bountiful protagonist from SH5. I attribute this to the life cycle of the PS2 and PS3; when the PS2 first came out, games didn't look much better then their PS compatriots, and likewise, current PS3 games don't look much better then cutting edge PS2 games. Given time, the power of the PS3 will be unlocked, and games will be able to blow us away.

The shadows of Silent Hill 5 were not much to sneeze at, nor were the characters faces; all the female characters looked to be about the same age (25, with botox), and have the same build. The character hair was just awful. Heck, the hair from that (really bad) Final Fantasy movie a few years ago was leaps and bounds better then this game. Come to think of it, Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube) did a better job on hair.

The music was sublime, and blended fairly well, a plus in my opinion. The sound effects were good. Howling dogs, clunky steps, metal crashing from Alex knocking over every damn thing that isn't nailed down, etc. Although knocking over an object, then running into it again before it hit the ground made the object hit silently, so that was a good way to clear a path around enemies without them hearing you.

Screen brightness. This is a big one for me. The screen can be adjusted from pitch black at the low end to almost black at the high end. Unlike previous silent hill games, objects didn't "pop", so it was easy to miss a weapon, or health bottle. My biggest problem was I couldn't see a damn thing until I turned the brightness all the way up, and then some, and I still couldn't see everything. I ran into more objects then I care to admit, which pissed me off when I am running away from forty gazillion enemies, and I get stuck on... nothing. Although when I die, it turns out I got stuck on some chair, or stool, and just could not see it.

PS: The camera angles suck too. The camera got caught on objects when I was fighting enemies in cramped spaces, and it would reset to ridiculous angles in the middle of a fight, which proved to be fairly annoying, but handle able if you just dodge twice while the camera resets. That way, you don't get hit and die a horrible horrible death.

As Alex, you wake up in a demented crazy-town style hospital, strapped to a gurney. Immediately, you look outside the room doors and see Pyramid head disembowel some poor schmoe just feet from you. Oh NOES!!!!! You are then introduced to action buttons, basically just spamming a button until Alex does something, like cut a wall, kick an enemy, or break something. I was highly let down when failure to press the action button didn't bring Pyramid head to slay me, even after ten minutes of inaction. The action button is quite effective when you are grappling enemies set of killing you, but for everything else it is useless.

The hospital is the only place in the game that truly feels like Silent Hill of old. Creepy, and scary, with random bodies falling from the ceiling, and wheelchairs tumbling pell mell down stairs. However, after you exit the hospital, Silent Hill five ceases to be traditional Silent Hill, and just becomes... some game. There is none of the traditional weird creepy random things that make Silent Hill iconic; no giant malformed faces, no waltzing shadows, no oozing blood walls, nothing. Even the transformations from Shepards Glen to the "other world" aren't like other games, they seem forced and lacking motivation.

Even the fog of Shepard's Glen was bland. Silent Hills two and three had better fog. (They should have stolen the fog code from Maximo; it was build for the N64, and fog like elements were something the N64 excelled at.)

Hell world, or the other world, or whatever they call it now is sorely lacking. The game makers just took the same room/building patterns and slapped on some new, not even shiny bitmaps and called it done. Silent Hill two had better hell world graphics. Not to mention new puzzles and paths that helped you explore the Silent Hill saga, both of which Sh5 is sorely lacking.

The combat system in Silent Hill is almost identical to Resident Evil 4. You go to combat stance, draw your gun, and maneuver the targeting reticule over the enemies body parts, then plug away. Just like RE4, you will be constantly running out of ammo, but it is because in SH5 you can only carry a fully loaded gun + two extra full reloads. (I hesitate to call them clips, but that's pretty much what they are. In Resident Evil, there just isn't enough ammo to go around. Oh, and ammo boxes, health items, etc don't stick around from one scene to another. So either you get it, or it's gone.)

This is the first Silent Hill game to consistently have multiple enemies ganging up on the protagonist; SH3 would have a couple of such traps, most notably the hell mall. The enemies in SH 5 were attracted to Alex's light, and turning that off and sneaking around in the shadows would actually work, unlike Silent Hill 2 or 3, although you had to be careful of running into things and knocking them over. One thing I did notice is that if you engaged multiple enemies at once, but focused strictly on one of them, the others would just stand around and wait their turn to fight you, but if you would dodge-roll, or wound multiple enemies, then they would gang up on you. The best way to avoid hitting multiples of enemies turned out to be equipping the knife, pressing up on the left analog stick slightly, and hacking away with quick attacks.

Schisms, for me, were the only exception, they would gang up and use their reach attacks at the same time. To handle that, equip the knife, slash twice, and roll. Or back them into a corner and slash away. The knife is the fastest weapon in the game, and works best on everything except lurkers. The axe + strong attack equals a headless lurker.

Some combat with enemies also turns out to be buggy. I had several fights with needlers in which the needler would be knocked to the ground, then levitate about halfway up a wall, or "teleport" to another part of the room.

On the plus side, you can decapitate enemies, and the enemies show damage as they take it, allowing you to gauge how much more fighting you have to do.

Gone are the days of auto targeting, and one thing SH5 does that drove me batty, (and cost me more lives then I care to admit) is after cut scenes where enemies appear, they appear right next to you. If you have a melee weapon equipped, you are good as gold, but if you have a gun, watch out. The targeting reticule is too slow to draw a bead without getting hit at least once. That's why I recommend the shotgun, it has wide dispersal, and will hit pretty much anything in front of you, even if you are not sure what you are aiming at.

That brings me to the item system. Item select is slow and buggy. To bring up the item menu press L1 for items, and R1 for guns and flashlights. If you press L/R1 you are fine, but if you hold down the button then select an item, that item is automatically used, even if you hit the cancel button.

For example, if all you are carrying is some serums, and you hold L1, and hit the left analog stick, your serums will be selected. Both pressing the circle button while still holding L1, and letting go of L1 then pressing circle will cause the serum to be used, however, if you tapped L1, the game will allow you to back out of the menu without harm.

The reason this is so annoying is that to go to combat stance you have to press and HOLD L2, so you get trained to press and hold L1.

The way the endings work is even different then other SH games. Gone are the rankings, and random data pages. The stars are gone. Then ending list is gone. The unlockable endings are open to anyone, not just the single save file you had. Oh, and to unlock new endings, you don't even have to play through the entire game again. Just save right before the turning points in the game, reload, and change away.

The endings are not too bad. They were sufficiently vague enough to be open to interpretation and depending on your interpretation of them yields some new insights into the machinations of Silent Hill. However, the UFO ending is unlike the UFO endings for the rest of the series, and the Pyramid Head ending has no motivation leading up to it. (I guess you are supposed to draw that Alex has become a cold blooded killer and has thus joined the ranks of other such pointy headed cold blooded killers.) Other then those two endings, the rest of them were actually kind of nice.

Overall, the game had a few nice points in it, but it lacked the scary feel of other Silent Hill games, and it did not maintain the consistency of the series. It's as if the programmers put their all into the objects of the game, and your interactions with them rather than the plot, character development, or mojo. If the game started out as silent Hill 5, ans was built from scratch then I am sorely disappointed in both Double Helix and Foundation 9, but it feels as if the had another game in the incubator, got the chance to do SH 5, and just rebranded the game, ala Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES.

I would recommend buying the game only if you find it in a bargin bin somewhere, otherwise renting is the way to go. The game tries, but fails, to be Silent Hill.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/24/08

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