Silent Hill 2

     When people think back to old-school survivor horror games, many people list Silent Hill 2 as their favorite. They say it's creepy, has a great story, and the characters are memorable. Playing through the game now-a-days rears some ugly heads that people may have over looked eight years ago though. It's also definitely one of those games with a terribly slow beginning, and had I not been looking for a game to review, I would've stopped shortly after starting.
      
         Silent Hill 2 tells the story of James Sunderland, a man who must ask every living person in Silent Hill if they've seen

his apparently dead wife Mary. After about an hour or so through the game, you'll meet all the characters you'll interact with through the rest of the game which thankfully, are only a handful of people. James travels from building to building in hopes of clues to his wife's whereabouts, sometimes jumping down a comical amount of incredibly dark holes. Like I said earlier, parts of the game start out pretty slowly, and the story is definitely part of it. When you reach the halfway point though, it really starts to pick itself up and sucks you into it, it's just a bummer that it takes so long.
     
         The production values of Silent Hill 2 still hold up, for the most part, after all these years. Monsters look like random pieces of flesh somehow holding up and attacking y ou, and music helps to create a frightening atmosphere. All the character models have great detail to them as does the flashlight, I was pretty impressed by how much it actually helped me. Also something that impressed me were the variations on footstep sounds, I actually grew to like them quite a bit. The voice-acting however, is something that I didn't like one bit.

Everyone sounded pretty robotic and in scenes where it's supposed to be somber, I could've help but laugh. That coupled with the fact that no one except for Maria seems to afraid of all the monsters running around baffled me to the very end, I don't k now about you, but if nurses without faces starting stabbing at me in the streets, I'd ask the few people that are around what's going on.
     
     Gameplay is the usual mix of puzzle solving and combat that you expect from a survival horror game. You control James from a 3rd person perspective that changes between free to fixed camera control like tank, push forward and he'll go forward in whatever direction he's looking in. I never used the sidestep in my entire playthrough, but the idea of moving while aiming (But not while actually shooting) is something that seems like the perfect middle-ground between Resident Evil and free-shooting third person shooters. While the combat itself is satisfying, you won't find the ammo or health packs to do it up until the end, where it feels like Konami wanted to make you feel like a bad-ass, so you find yourself running from most fights, which didn't bother me one bit. The puzzles can be a little confusing sometimes, but most if not all of them felt like a victory in themselves once I got done with them.

      
        
       Three stars seems a little negative, but when I say the game starts off slow, I really do mean it. You shouldn't have to suffer through the first few hours when the game is only eight more hours. Every part of Silent Hill 2 just isn't fun in the beginning, it just feels like you're running from point A to point B without enjoying it and that's a shame. Once you do get over that hump though, you're in for a pretty good horror game that's sure to scare you, the save screen alone made me scream the first few times I accessed it. While not the classic everyone makes it out to be, it's surely a good addition to anyone's PS2 library.