Silent Hill: The Game That Would Have Been 5 if 5 Silent Hills Didnt Exist Before It

i was so jazzed for Silent Hill: Homecoming that i acted like a hungry cat (i flipped over a table and threw a television out the window). i am happy to report the game did not let me down.

i don`t discuss story lines in games because i honestly don`t give a hoot. so lets get to the important part, the gameplay.

there was a major overhaul to the movement and combat system of the game. you were also given a health bar, which replaced the sometimes ambiguous blinking picture in other Silent Hill games (aside from THE ROOM, but that game hardly counts as a game, more like a pain in the johnson). the movement has gone away from the Desert Strike heckicopter controls from previous games and now operates on the dual analogue stick control. this pissed some people off immensely, but those people are r-tards.

new to combat is a two attack strength system, which follows into the natural progression of "chomboes." there is also a dodge button, which lets you avoid attacks and return with a JOLT COUNTER attack of your own. did this new combat system remove the horror aspect of the Silent Hill franchise and replace it with ACTION? according to a bunch of turds, it certainly did. according to me, no it didn`t.

one major problem people had was that gunplay is different. no longer to you auto aim at the nearest monster. you now have a manual aiming mode. this allows for precise aiming, and i GUESS longer range shots (not really though) but people are saying you can stand across the room and just shoot everything. number 1) you don`t get enough ammo for that and number 2) you can`t even CARRY very much ammo. in other Silent Hill games it was easy to amass hundreds of bullets. in Homecoming, you can`t hold more than one full magazine + 2 full reloads for any gun. hardly an ACTION staple.

one thing i felt was AWESOME about the game (well, most of the game was awesome) was how fast you moved from location to location. i think i only opened the map like 10 times the whole game, which is much much different from every other Silent Hill (i had to learn how to read maps because of other Silent Hill games). so no more opening the map every 15 seconds to figure out where you are going in huge buildings full of locked doors. Homecoming plays fairly linear, and in a very good way.

my one major complaint with the game is that the enemies are total d-bags most of the time. they are much more aggressive than in previous Silent Hill games, and they also take more damage and have more variety in their attack methods. this complaint doesn`t go against how great the game is, it`s just a general complaint because i`m still angry about getting smoke in my dudes lungs from those arsehole Smogs.

the boss fights are a little more epic than other Silent Hill boss fights, with the exception of the final boss, which aside from being the biggest jerk in the game, wasn`t anything all that memorable. every boss had a button prompt FINISH HIM move, which was either done well or done kinda crummy. there was no clear indication that you needed to do this on the first boss, so i ended up hitting it like 500 times more than i probably needed to.

one thing i actually thought was really neat was how they took some stuff Silent Hill the movie and integrated it into the game. they also took some inspiration from the movie HOSTEL (not the boobs, unfortunately). they had the order soldiers dressed in the miner suits, and some barbed wire that reminded me of the movie, and even Pyramid Head being followed by some gross ass bugs.

i greatly enjoyed all the new features in Silent Hill: Homecoming, and honestly did not miss any of the stuff they took out. not even QUICK TURN. they left in the staples of the series such as the lead pipe, the radio, the flashlight, and the OTHERWORLD. and they went ahead and changed the movement and combat for the better.

i would give this game an 8.5/10. while being linear it still didn`t really help you too much on what you were supposed to do. i remember being stuck for almost an hour because i didn`t know i had to use an item in the same room i got it. there are a few glitches in the game as well, one where you can`t see anything but door frames and you character which i experienced once, and one major glitch it would appear where one puzzle doesn`t have a solution that makes sense. half the people insist the answer in 2:06, but the other half have varying time solutions (i myself had 1:07). there is also no Final Score after you complete the game, which i always felt was important to the series.

so, great game with a few minor flaws keeping it from being GAME OF THE WEEK for me (i got BioShock for my 360, so that pretty much wins).

~Maxie