How does survival horror become ho-hum?
I love the Silent Hill series. My first one was Silent Hill 2 on PS2. It was an amazing experience and I've been a fan ever since. That said, Silent Hill: Homecoming probably holds the record for the longest period of time it's taken me to finish a Silent Hill game.
I spent the last four hours (or so my wife says) playing it and though at first I was frustrated with it (for it's lack of health items and somewhat steep difficulty), I can safely say there's nothing really inherently wrong with Silent Hill: Homecoming. It doesn't have a godawful long escort mission like The Room did. The combat is a little more involved than previous games but not to the point of turning Silent Hill into River City Ransom. There's some fresh new enemies, and that ol' chestnut Pyramid Head makes a couple of cameos. He just pops his big old head in, does something fucked up, and ducks out.
I suppose my biggest complaint about it is that it's kind of boring. The enemies don't come off as scary more than they do annoying. There's a spider thing that is an utter pain in the ass as you need to duck and dodge his attacks and he's CONSTANTLY blocking yours. You encounter more living people in this Silent Hill than any of the others, yet none of them really contribute much.
The game has a couple decision points where what you choose determines the ending you get. They occur late in the game and if you save before the first one, you can revert back to that save and you'll only have to redo the last two hours of the game to get the majority of the alternate endings and then there's one more for finishing the game on Hard difficulty. I may have the gamerpoint greed to see the low hanging fruit (the decision point endings) but I probably don't have it in me to grind through the whole game again to see that Hard difficulty ending.
I won't play the Rate Silent Hill Games game because I haven't played the first three in so long but I'll put Homecoming above The Room but definitely below 2 and maybe below 1 and 3. It's a good game if you're a fan and you can get it for cheap.
