Silent Hill: Homecoming

"More blood, monsters and rusty nightmare worlds? Yawn."

A Review by Bill Lange

BOTTOM LINE: All of the usual Silent Hill trappings with none of the soul.

The original Silent Hill is a classic of the survival horror genre, but try playing it now in the era of HDTVs and next-gen gaming systems, and you'll be lucky to keep from going blind. A few years later the sequel became a legend in its own right, with vastly improved graphics and a sad, cautionary plot that ended with a shocking revelation about the main character.

The latest game in the series, Silent Hill Homecoming, is a prettied-up rehash of Silent Hill 2's ideas with few innovations to show for the leaps made in technology and gameplay since then.

Case in point: just like Silent Hill Origins before it, Homecoming stars a James Sunderland carbon-copy with a muddled past and severe family issues.

The unlucky weirdo this time is Alex Shephard, the black sheep of his town who has just been released from a military hospital and returns home just in time for all Hell to break loose. He has a dark secret in his past (you know, just like every other Silent Hill protagonist) that surfaces at exactly the wrong moment, of course! On a quest to save his brother Josh, you'll journey with Alex from Shephard's Glen to Silent Hill and back again through the course of the game, with plenty of blood and rust along the way.

Much of the charm of the original Silent Hill came from main character Harry Mason's absolute ineptitude in combat. He needed frequent breaks from running long distances, handled a steel pipe very awkwardly, and couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a handgun. This added to the tension of the game as you weren't playing as a bullet-spewing Rambo wannabe, but rather as a scared everyman only in this situation because he's trying to save his daughter from the freakish monsters populating the town.

Compare this to Alex "He-Man" Shephard in Homecoming, who can dodge almost any attack from the various beasts roaming the streets before smashing their heads in with relative ease. On Normal difficulty, the player will waltz right through the game with only a handful of deaths; health items are plentiful, you'll find ammo right when you need it and save points are evenly spaced.

The story makes a hell of a lot more sense than Silent Hill Origins' lazy claptrap, but not by much. The connection between Alex's hometown and Silent Hill isn't given away until late in the game, but it's a decent device for moving the action to the cursed town instead of starting there. However, the big reveal about Alex and his brother is visible from miles away, and the final hour or two of gameplay is a huge chunk of exposition that could have been handled much better.

Did you enjoy the Silent Hill movie? The developers of Homecoming sure did, as many elements from the film have been folded into the game, like the design of the Nurse monsters, the church, and the rather careless use of barbed wire hanging about. The game's visuals are the best thing about it; even though the human characters look like bizarre flesh mannequins, the real-time reality shifts to Otherworld add a new dimension to Silent Hill Homecoming's immersive pull.

Even though he only appeared in one game, the series' apparent poster boy Pyramid Head makes a few cameos, scenes that make little sense when held up the established canon and only reinforces the argument that Silent Hill Homecoming panders to fans on all cylinders.

Tons of inexcusable, frustrating bugs and glitches plague the game, including several game-breaking puzzle glitches that make it impossible to proceed and require loading up an earlier save, assuming you have one. A "darkness bug" makes it incredibly difficult to see anything that's happening on the screen, leading to cheap deaths and gamer rage.

After a frustrating final boss fight (which gets easier if you wise up and just unload all of your remaining ammo into it), you're presented with one of five endings, four ranging from Good to Bad, and of course the UFO ending. The thing is, the ending you receive is determined by three decisions you're forced to make through the last 4-5 hours of gameplay, meaning that you could load up a save right before the first decision and get all endings with relative ease. This cheapens the notion that your decisions affect Alex's fate, since the first 60% of the game has no bearing on your ending.

There's really nothing here that hasn't been explored already in previous games. Much like Silent Hill Origins, the developers have crafted a love letter to fans that may keep them satisfied for now, but hungry for innovation in a series that's beginning to get stale. Silent Hill vets will want to see the tale to its conclusion, but will be disappointed to see a sequel that ultimately brings nothing new to the table.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/17/09

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