Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

"A wondefully made Survival Horror that will please 3D action/adventure gamers as well!"

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams is my favorite Survival Horror. It isn't as pretty as Resident Evil for the GCN, but it is fun as a barrel of monkeys. The free-roaming style and active camera (as opposed to the prerendered backgrounds is the way it should be)

The melee fighting in Silent Hill 2 is a huge advancement over Capcom's Resident Evil (where your knife is 100% useless). Someone finally realized that you don't have enough bullets to shoot endless zombies and that a nasty stick will get the job done.

Silent Hill 2 is like a movie. I don't own it and probably will never play all of the different modes. I don't even know which I played. All I know is that it could actually work as a story instead of the other survival Horror games premise of... ''Find key, cross area, find door handle, cross area! Find tire pump, plug into completely strange puzzle to open secret door and find slip of paper (?)''. I hope you have gotten my drift by now.
In SH2:RD, you can figure out where to go next and you can enjoy the experience. It may make you wet your pants though when a guy that looks like a man with a Backhoe scooper on his head and a 4 foot (and very very very wicked looking) Chinese Meat Cleaver comes after you. Good thing you hopefully have stockpiled a lot of ammo and used your melee weapon to a good extent. Oh yeah. When I rent a survival horror game, i usually need a hint or two (or 3 or 4 or 5) from a GameFAQ. I am proud of myself for figuring out all I needed by myself in SH2:RD.

Silent Hill 2 would make a great Horror movie. Take a believable character involved in a mysterious psychotic ramp through a seriously jacked up town in the mountains and you have the base story for Silent Hill 2. Add a crazy little smart-assed little girl, and some freaky and super strange zombies, a great free roaming environment, encompassing a town and not a single building, and you have a great story for Silent Hill 2. Like Max Payne, it is a lot like an interactive Movie.

It is a wonderfully great game (with full motion mouths in video). Pretty Graphics, Great controls, excellently rounded combat, and tough, yet manageable puzzles neatly packed into a solid title.

This is a real fun game, just make sure to empty your bladder before playing. I do not have an XBox, and am not a GCN fanboy, but if you have an XBox, this is a MUST HAVE.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/08/02, Updated 06/08/02