A lot of halves of a lot of people.
By Shaunage 1 Comments
I am a pretty big fan of the Survival Horror genre. There are three Resident Evils and a
Silent Hill 2 featured what I believe to be the best story ever told by a game. SH5's story isn't quite as good, but is still very solid. I've deleted a few sentences here because I don't want to spoil even a little bit of the story.
The ability to strafe has been added and it works so well that I am now completely sold on RE5's controls. Silent Hill's fantastic map system returns, with our character scribbling notes on his map as you explore, marking which doors are blocked off, locked and so on, as well as marking the location of important features and save points. I haven't played SH2 for a while, so I don't remember what the constraints on ammunition were, but Homecoming limits you to less than 30 pistol rounds and I believe 12 shotgun rounds at any one time. The combat is very melee focused, with a brand new dodge/counter system as well as a bunch of finishing moves, which never got quite as varied as I'd hoped. Taking the dog's head off with a knife is pretty spectacular the first time you see it, though.
While we're on the subject, Silent Hill: Homecoming is a violent game. Violent enough that it puts the other games in the series to shame and also violent enough to have been banned from sale in my country. Hooray for the region free PS3 and hooray for Ebay. Probably every second room in the game has half of a person in it. The ambient gore is amazing. It's just... everywhere. Fighting certain enemies will show you exactly why, too. One enemy in particular will pick you up, turn you sideways and cut you in half using the blade on his head. There's also this one scene involving a drill and someone's eye that the OFLC specifically mentioned in the banning notice... Several times I let myself die just to see what would happen. I still disagree with the banning - all of the Saw movies have released at a 15 here and SH5 certainly isn't more violent that those - but it is very VERY violent.
The standard for Silent Hill games as far as I've seen has been that you explore the entirety of a multistoreyed building, trigger the dark world by finding something important and then go back through those same (but significantly rustier) rooms again. SH5 does use the dark world a lot, using the peeling effect from the movie to show it, which is amazing, but it doesn't often make you go through the same area twice. The one time I can think of is a scene in Alex's house which is amazingly creative.
The addition of human enemies near the end of the game seemed odd, since they're significantly easier to kill than everything else. In all fairness, there are only about 10 of these in the entire game. The boss fights are uniformly brilliant and as usual for Silent Hill, when you realise the reason for what the bosses each look like you will be horrified. This theme of blending enemy design with the darker elements of the story has always been a strong point for the series and this game's bosses might well be the pinnacle of that.
In summary, if you like Silent Hill games or Survival Horror in general, Silent Hill: Homecoming is a very good example of each of these and you should almost definitely play it.