Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

"Welcome to Silent Hill. I hope you brought some firewpower."

Back around 1998, Resident Evil was a huge success, and so was Resident Evil 2. Konami saw this, and wanted to take a dive into the Survival-Horror Genre, but at a different angle. Instead of scaring the gamer with cheap “BOO!!” like in Resident Evil, they decided to let the atmosphere scare you, giving you nearly pitch black areas, with a small flashlight to guide you, you could never see what was in front of you. Silent Hill was by far one of the best survival horror titles to date, but did Silent Hill 2 live up to the expectations? Read this review to find out

Story : (9/10) the story of Silent Hill 2 is completely different than the first one. A new character, a new cast of characters you explore a pretty much different part of the town of Silent Hill. You start off as James Sunderland; he has received a letter from his late wife, who died a few years ago, telling him to go meet them in their “special place” in the town of Silent Hill. As James arrives on the outskirts of the town, the road is blocked off, and he has to walk a quite a ways to get to the main town. When he gets to the town, he goes thru a majority of places, eventually coming to a startling conclusion at the end. The ending itself is rather sad, the story isn’t much happier either. It’s an overall a very interesting, story. But the endings are rather lacking, most of the time you will find yourself saying “Wha????”, because it leaves it very vague. I give it a 9.

Game play: : (7/10) Let me start off by saying that, Silent Hill 2 is not as scary as the first one. The atmosphere feels less spooky because you can pretty much see everything, even with the flashlight off. But you also spend a lot of time in the streets exploring, while this is kind of neat, it also gets kind of old, real fast. Particularly on your second run on the game. Most of the time you spend in this game is running around fetching items, and solving interesting riddles. The controller is much different than the PS2 one, meaning the strafe buttons are not on the shoulder, they are moved on the above the “examine” button, and the map button. So sometimes when you try to strafe you may hit the map button. Happened a few times to me, but then again, it’s not like there was any place to put them.

Another thing is, the amount of ammo you find is an abundance, just about everywhere you go there is ammunition, which is good, but also makes things a little easy. Also, most of the monsters go down with relative ease. 5 hits with a wooden plank can easily take down most stuff. There are a lot of items to collect in the game, on my first play-thru I missed 2 of the weapons and a lot of ammunition and health. But if you explore every area, thoroughly, you can easily get items. The items themselves, don’t sparkle or anything like in Resident Evil, instead, James turns his head and looks at it, or the camera angle changes when you get near it to show a key item. Also the map is improved from the first Silent Hill, this time not only does James mark all the locked or broken doors, he also marks which rooms have save points in them, which makes it easier. Konami also added a memo pad for James. Meaning, when you read a file, that contains clues to a puzzle, you no longer have to go back to the file and read it. Because James writes it down in his pad, it saves a lot of running around time, or physically having to write it down! The boss fights are rather easy though, not much challenge at all. Also the camera could be a tad better, sometimes it shifts around when you don’t want it to, but you can pretty much control the camera by holding the L trigger. I give it a 7 out of 10 for minor setbacks.

Graphics : 9/10 The graphics at first may seem pretty lame, because it’s blurry, gritty, and annoying. But this is just a feature Konami put it just to make the game a little scarier, once you turn off the noise effect, it looks really good. The town itself is really good looking; everywhere you go is very detailed. The graphics themselves look a tad crisper and a little nicer than the PS2 version. I give it a 9 out of 10, could have been better though.

Sound/Audio : 10/10 This is where the game absolutely shines, the sound is crisp, and it has an amazing soundtrack. Sometimes when you are running in the environment you hear things (like scraping), thinking something will attack, but nothing does, just some mind games Konami likes to play on you. It’s absolutely great, 10/10!

Replay Value: 9/10 Once you are done, there is a lot more you can do, you can replay the game for one, and unlock new weapons. Also there are 6 hidden endings to get, a few joke endings as well. But sometimes on your way thru again, it gets kind of repetitive, but still fun. Also you get the ammo multiplier, meaning you basically never run out of ammo, the amount of ammo you get three times more. Meaning by the end of the game you will have over 700 bullets! Just little things like that, that gives it more fun.

I’d get this game if you don’t have it on PS2 already, it’s definably better on the XBOX, because of the extras and the crisper graphics. But if you already own it for another system, then I wouldn’t go out of your way to buy it, but it’s a great game, and simply should not be missed by anyone who likes survival horror!

Final Score: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/03