When Konami released the first Silent Hill for the PS1, the game easily showed as much promise as the then-young Resident Evil series. A wave of games for multiple formats and a pretty dire movie later, and the franchise has ground to a halt somewhat. Despite lashings and lashing of atmosphere, that trend doesn’t seem to have been shifted with this new Xbox 360 version.
The story sees Alex Shepherd heading back from his native Shepherd’s Glen to try and shed some light on the disappearance of his brother. From the first few minutes of play there is confusion to be had, as you’re thrown headlong into a dark and dank hospital with only an absolutely terrible flashlight to guide your way. After a short period of time, your first enemy appears and the flaws in the game’s melee combat system are thrown right in your face as you dodge, cut, cut, dodge your way through a trio of angry (but stupid) zombie nurses without taking a single slice of damage. This repetition and lack of challenge continues throughout the game, aside from when you’re taking on some of the bigger opponents much, much later on.
In other games, this wouldn’t be something that kills the entire experience, but when you’re playing a survival horror game, you need a reason to be scared that goes beyond the mere perception of a threat. You need to genuinely fear that something might happen, and know that it CAN happen. With Silent Hill: Homecoming, you can feel free to wander about and ignore the creaks and musical indicators because even if a lone enemy, group of enemies or even a team of facehugging bugs appear, you know that you can dispatch of them with relative ease and not have to fear for your character’s life. This is a big problem.
When you add this to a set of pseudo-puzzles that generally wouldn’t phase a five year-old, you have a game that has a bark that is a great deal harsher than its bite. With Silent Hill: Homecoming this is a great shame, since the rest of the game is presented nicely enough with well-timed cutaways and a wonderful grainy-film effect that – if it wasn’t for the aforementioned problems – would have really dished out the atmosphere with a massive spoon. Or ladle, if that’s your serving implement of choice. Other graphical effects such as a fair amount of clipping (on the Xbox 360 version, at least) are less desirable, and only serve as a booster for other, more minor issues such as the way everyone looks like they’re made of strangely yellowed paper when standing in the fog.
The musical score by Akira Yamaoka is something special -as is always the case with the Silent Hill games. It would be even better if those beautifully imagined crescendos ever led to anything exciting happening on screen. There are a multitude of psychological setups that threaten to lead to something interesting, but they always end up being massively predictable and take you down the generic action path. And unfortunately, that’s all that Silent Hill: Homecoming ends up being – a generic action title that contains some truly stunning musical pieces. And that means that even fans of the series may not appreciate this one.[rmgallery id=60]
thanks!