Effort was in short supply
I started playing Silent Hill 2 on my PS2 some time ago, and I thought this would be a nice addition. I have not finished SL2 yet, but I like what I have seen so far. But, I cannot say the same for this game. But I shall admit, I did play this game on the PC, and most of my issues with the game stem from the extremely sloppy port that was, I’m going to say, attempted. But, I shall get to that in a bit. First, the game is not that extremely scary. Sure, its spooky, and has lots of fog, and the monsters are hard to kill, but scary? Nah. It’s more of a ‘look at the scary monsters’ type of thing. And when there are monsters, there is combat, which is also problematic. I had trouble beating the nurses and those ones with the meal claws/arms/what-not. The nurses took too much damage, and they gave too much. They could attack in rapid succession, and just obliterate you in very little time. And then there were the metal armed things. Those were annoying. I had trouble fighting those, as you have to attack from the side, and the only way to get to the side is to use the dodge option. That works ok, sometimes, but not all the time. For 2009, I think the graphics are ok, but not amazing. Amnesia is scarier, and a better horror game for it. You should watch Zero Punctuation’s review of this game, he gets it completely. It feels less scary and more action than it should. Then, we get to the PC part of this little review. First off, this has got to be the sloppiest PC port I have ever seen. On my PC, most of the audio came out of one head phone. This really takes you out of the atmosphere (what atmosphere there was) and reminds you that you are playing a game with technical issues. Worse yet, some audio comes out of the other side some times, which reminds you that it’s not your earphones that are acting up. Also, the game is capped at 30 FPS. Well, I understand it’s a port, and that may be limited for the 360 and ps3, but couldn’t you at least get it up to 60? I mean, these are computers, lets show what they can do, eh? Also, there are two graphical settings, high and medium. Apparently low was cut out of the game. I mean, if they were only going to have two settings, make them high and low, not medium. Then there are the load times. Long for a PC, but I imagine they are ok for a console. But I’m not playing on a console, I’m on a PC. And I expect my games to load faster, because I put the money and effort in to have them load faster. It’s very disappointing. But, let’s not forget about the crashing. I hope you don’t plan on minimizing and then returning, because most likely, the game will crash. Oh yes, nearly (if not actually) every time. And I hope you save often, because I once had the game crash while loading. Yeah, that was annoying. Had to restart and play a part of the game again. Uhg, what a crappy PC port. Its like they did not even try
