Customer Reviews
major dissapointment - By: Osman Younus, 31 Jul 2010 
Well like all SH fans, I was really excited about this release. I saw all the problems straight out of the box, but I made allowances because it was silent hill
There is little introduction to the game, you're pretty much thrown straight into it. But I thought fair enough, the story must build up slowly. But it doesn't. There is no background. You won't care for any other characters. When you encounter the bosses, there's no sense of WHY you're battling them. The final boss had no sense of finality about it. It was just another hurdle to clear. Hollow & empty
The controls are just awful. It is so linear. They clearly haven't tried. Contrast to arkham asylum or metal gear solid where the range of movement is vast, flowing & expansive. There seems to be a delay from pressing a button to the execution actually happening. Whichin combat is so, so irritating.
The settings have now become oh so tiresome. The whole running aroundin the dark thing is a lot more frustrating than it is scary. Althoughin the later stages of the game the settings do begin to show a bit of color whilst maintaining some eeriness. Thankgod.
There was only puzzlein this game that is challenging. It would have been nice to re-introduce the silent hill 3 option where you could set the riddle level. Instead the majority of the puzzles have become tedious & tiresome.
Save points are so far between. For me this was a real pain, as I like to sit down & have play for 20 minutes here or there. Each time you turn it on, expect a 45 minute session. At minimum. This ruins the flow of the game, as you get into the mindset of i'll just play till the next save point.
One introduction I did like was that during the video scenes, you had options on what do to next. For example, you could choose between one of two questions to ask. I dont know whether the choices you make influence the game. There was one scene where you have to make a really difficult decision. However, on the whole this feature was not utilized enough. It had massive potential
In conclusion, not worth it. Every other member of the series tops this one; with silent hill 2 sitting at the top as a game that me & my flatmate still talk about 5 years after having completed it! I completed this game yesterday & i've forgotten about it already
Equal parts frustrating, boring and disappointing - By: Ms. S. L. Houghton, 24 May 2010 As a long-time Silent Hill & general horror fan, I was certainly dubious when I heard that development of Homecoming had been handed over to a different team than the original. Silent Hill has always been the definitive horror game series, foregoing standard gore & gimmicky jumpy scares for a pervasive atmosphere & disturbing exploration of all the unattractive elements of the human psyche. Since the original game, Silent Hill has been setting the standard for visuals, setpieces, stories & sound effects that get right under your skin & are difficult to forget.
How unfortunate that Homecoming seems to be the first real deviation from the perverse deviance that we have come to know & love from that immersive, terrifying town. The pieces, at first glance, are all there & SHOULD have worked. You play Alex, a discharged war veteran returning home to his town nearby the infamous Silent Hill, only to find it shroudedin fog & largely empty aside from a menagerie of Silent Hill beasties. He sets off to find his younger brother & uncover the violent mystery that wracks his hometown.
The graphics are pretty polished, if uninspired. Everything looks a little too clean for Silent Hill - you spend most of the time wandering around the grey town, the grainy filter over everything is half-hearted, & even that trademark slimy sheen on the enemies is either absent or so badly rendered that the enemies look plastic. The enemies themselves are a dull assortment of monsters, some with interesting designs, but the developers seem to have forgotten one thing - the MEANING each of those enemies holds to the protagonist. We never get to connect the enemies with the guilt & doubts & personality flaws that the protagonist holds as we didin the previous games - they're just stereotypical horror monsters.
For example, Pyramid-Head's rolein Silent Hill 2 was an exceptionally personal one to the protagonist of that game, but with appearancesin the movie, the arcade game, & now Homecoming, he has been reduced to a standard recurring horror villain. This is, for me, the epitome of how the developers have lost sight of what makes Silent Hill a successful horror series. Team Silent really explored aesthetics, concepts, sounds & scenarios that were genuinely psychologically disturbing - if you've ever seen the Making Of for Silent Hill 2, you'll see that they are completely unabashedin explaining how they drew their inspiration from everything to abandoned places to sex, rape, human deformity & violation. The new team seem to have tried very hard to emulate many of the standards of the previous Silent Hill games, without really understanding or getting their claws into the psychological depravity that makes all of those standards work.
As a result, it feels empty. The atmosphere is non-existent. The reliance on 'make you jump' scares & mobbing you with enemies is more Resident Evil than Silent Hill. There is no wickedly clever use of disorienting camera angles. Their best effort seems to be making your fumble aroundin the pitch black - a frustrating rather than frightening exercise. And when you strip away the scares & the atmosphere from Silent Hill, what you are left with is a guy wandering around an empty, foggy town. Boring, to say the least!
Add to this the fact that the gameplay design is ludicrously bad, & you have an excellent example of how Silent Hill should not be done. Your progress through the game is exceptionally linear - there is hardly any frightened, panicky exploration of sprawling, rotting buildings because there is usually only one way to go. The barbaric, morbid puzzles are mostly missing, & the entire game feels like a neverending key hunt. Usually you have to keep going until you reach a dead end, sigh, turn back to return the way you came & suddenly a magical cutscene will open up a new way for you. As a gamer, you feel completely powerless & lack any influence. Save point locations are poorly chosen & few & far between - I appreciate that developers feel this might add difficulty, but often gamers will not have hours & hoursin one go to play a game. I have been forced to discard game progress several times simply because I had to switch off. It didn't help that several times, the game froze, making me unable to even continue from the last checkpoint.
The savepoint issue becomes particularly glaringin the second half of the game, where the difficulty all of a sudden becomes RIDICULOUS. There is so little health & ammunition & the combat is so finnicky that I don't think I ever fought one enemy unscathed. At one point I had to fight four or five of a particularly nasty breed of baddie with a fraction of my health bar left & no extra items to top it up, & THEN something else appeared to smash me to a bloody pulp.
To sum up - poor game design meets poor interpretation of Silent Hill's gloriously depraved charms to produce a gamein the franchise that I would rather forget. The only redeeming feature is the soundtrack, because Akira Yamaoka can do no wrong! Unfortunately, he has also abandoned ship now!
RIP, Team Silent. RIP, Silent Hill.
Silent Hill, for Mum - By: D. A. Hart, 30 Apr 2010 
Novice mum player has to ask son to help her kill the 'bosses' but otherwise good game play & atmosphere.
Maybe the Last of its Kind? - By: C. Pendlebury, 27 Mar 2010 
The reviewers who state that this is different from the other Silent Hill games are correctin that it has more action, but the essence is still there. Take the graveyard. You can read the poetry on all the tombs, some of it very perculiar indeed- some of the graves are stillborn babies & children. For me, this sort of stuff is real Silent Hill- strange paintings on walls, sounds of somone crying far away, suspense, mystery. Not dumb zombie monsters.
Now the team seems to be being stripped away- the composer who has made such amazing music for all the silent hill games is no longer at Konami, so this is probably his last SH work. Not to mention Team Silent no longer exists.
Maybe Silent Hills of the future are destined to go like Resident Evil did, away from spooky horror & into action. That's where the money lies, as no brainless kid will put up with games like this. What a pity.
a new strange experience - By: Courtois, 07 Oct 2009 Silent Hill is always a terrifying town, with family secrets & real horror , wainting for youin dark corners ; FEAR OF THE DARK !!
