Silent Hill: Homecoming

"Boy, did I ever want to enjoy this game..."

Silent Hill has always been one of my favorite video game series, reigning over other survival horror games like Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark. The puzzles were brilliant and thought-provoking, as was the story, which was essentially the paradigm for video game plot making. I stuck through the series, from Silent Hill 1, even all the way to Silent Hill 4, which at least was passable. The puzzles were lacking but still present, the story was the best since 2, and combat was reasonable, different but still related to the series' roots. The only game I haven't played is Origins.

Silent Hill 5 has changed my opinion. Unless something changes, I'm not going to buy Silent Hill 6, 7, or even 8. In fact, unless something changes, the series is officially dead to me. Not because I'm a fanboy crying about my favorite series being taken from the skillful hands of it's creators... No. Silent Hill 5 is simply a really, really bad game. It's combat is dreadful, it's puzzles are some of the worst I've ever seen, and many mechanics are simply broken. The only good part of the game is the story, but that isn't worth sitting through the terrible gameplay for, unfortunately. It took a lot to change my opinion.. But it worked.

SH5 is the story of Alex Shepard, a man coming to his hometown of Shepard's Glen because he has a strange feeling that his little brother Joshua is in danger. When he gets there, he quickly finds the place to be very different; people all over town are vanishing, but much more startling is that it's overrun with awful monsters. He sets off to rectify the situation the only way he knows how: pretending that he's in Resident Evil 4. No, really, it's not hard to see that SH5 took more than a few pages out of RE4's playbook; no real surprise. Resident Evil 4 managed to sell many copies by sacrificing the integrity of the series, why would people not want to imitate it? The most obvious "tribute" is the new over-the-shoulder combat camera. I don't mind it, no big deal. But it goes even further beyond that...

For the first time in the series, the focus is not on atmosphere and puzzles, but on combat. In the past games, the fright-factor of the games was created by the environment in itself, and the many strange things that could be found there. For instance, the mannequin room in Silent Hill 3, or the giant head room from 4. To augment that were puzzles, often very difficult that tested your cleverness or your thought process. These two things combined to make a very artful game that didn't depend solely on how well you could beat something with a pipe or point and press A with a handgun

Enter Silent Hill 5, where the developers seem to have forgotten what made their series great. Now there are little to no environmental scares.. In fact, there's little to no atmosphere. The nightmare areas are easily the most bland in the series, seeming to try and replicate Silent Hill 1's, rather than have it's own distinctive look unlike the others. I never found myself being frightened and uneasy about going through a tunnel or into a dark cellar, or investigate a strange noise I just heard. Nor did I find myself thinking more than a minute or two on a puzzle, if even that much. Most of them consisted of "find the key", or "stick this on the wall" puzzles that even the most brainless could grasp To fill this void, ever other room you are accosted by enemies, often in situations where you can't possibly avoid fighting them. Time and time again, you will be bashing the same critters. This would be just dandy if, like Resident Evil 4, they made the combat more refined to a point where it's enjoyable... But guess what? They didn't. Surprise!

Fighting will be the main thing you do in Silent Hill 5, and it is ironically the least fun thing to do in the game. You will mainly be fighting with melee weapons due to a idiotic limit on the amount of ammo you can carry. Four melee weapons are usable, ranging from a combat knife to an axe. None of them, however, are fun to use. Everything except for the knife is slow, clunky, and stiff to use, so there's no real reason to use anything but the knife in most every situation. This leads to every fight being rather long since the knife is the weakest weapon in the game.. Not to mention the way the enemies' health seems to bizarrely fluctuate. When I first met the Needler, a large spider creature, I killed it in two combos with my pipe. The second time, it took four. Go figure.

But you have to do more than attack things: you have a dodge move, and the developers want to make sure you use it. Unfortunately it seems that they were so intent on making use use it, they forgot to make it accessible. half of the time, the dodge makes you shift yourself into a position where you're even more likely to get hit. Other times, you dodge an attack only to have it somehow hit you, even though the swing clearly missed by three feet. This leads to many, many, many frustrating encounters. I never enjoyed combat for even a moment in this game. It's incredibly unrefined, and that could be looked beyond if the game didn't shove it down your throat at every moment it could.

Other gameplay elements are sorely in need of fixing... The inventory screen is quite annoying as well. The inventory screen was just fine in the previous games, but in SH5, the right and left bumpers control two screens, one for weapons, one for restorative items and puzzle-related things, however rare you find those. For some god-awful reason, you have to hold down the buttons while you work your way through them, and god forbid you highlight something by accident, because one wrong move and Alex will swallow that health drink or use that serum to fix up that little scratch you got earlier. There was simply no reason to format the inventory like that; a perfect example of how things that aren't broken don't need fixing.

The graphics are decent. I've seen better looking games, but by no means is it anything but a step up for the series. Monster designs are wonderful, and characters in motion look quite nice I will complain that the otherworld/nightmare worlds aren't nearly intuitive enough in design. As I said earlier, this game tries to emulate Silent Hill 1 in that the world stops looking like a city and starts looking like a hellish construct of rust and blood. But Silent Hill 1 did it better, despite graphical limitations, littering the areas with bizarre, frightening features you have to stop and look for, while for the most part this is just a simple stretch of rusty grates and catwalks. But I guess I can't complain.. Good enough.

Sound is also decent. The voice actors are the best Silent Hill has had since.. Well, ever. The monsters are good as well, and the sound of needlers crawling in the darkness, and nurses squelchingly twitching their stiff bodies are quite memorable.. Probably because they are the only real ambiance that sets Silent Hill 5's areas apart from a generic dirty hallway. But again, something exists to complain about: the music. I am a fan of Akira Yamaoka's noise music; deep industrial drums, banging and wailing, the sound of the gates of the underworld being opened! None of the games ever failed to enthrall me with the battle music that happens when you approach enemies and the boss musics... Until this one. I'm not sure what happened.. The music seems unfocused, and where there once was a distorted yet certainly recognizable rhythm to that banging and wailing, is left a jumble of noises that seems to try to imitate what it was in past games of the series.

Silent Hill 5 tries hard.. Which is admirable in it's own right. It seems these new developers really tried to get the feel that Team Silent had going in their games to match this one... But the mistake they made along the way was doing so much all at once. Silent Hill was making change, unlike the Resident Evil series. Silent Hill 3 added the ability to block attacks with your weapon. Silent Hill 4 gave you the ability to make charged swings. This slow, steady progression that build on combat already in the game and improved it was what should have been done here instead of throwing everything out the window and starting over. The story was good; good enough to ignore all the references to the sub-par movie, even! But I just can't suggest this game with the combat and inventory system so broken beyond repair.

Story: 7/10
Gameplay 5/10
Graphics: 7/10
Sound:8/10
Overall: 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/09

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