Synopsis: scream Warning: Contains Spoilers, might want to read the review below.
Alex Shepherd has been in the military for a long time, after so long, he is returning home to Shepherd's Glen, Alex starts the game off in an Asylum version of Alchemilla Hospital, where he makes his escape, he stumbles upon his younger brother, Joshua, and pursues him for as long as he can. At the end, he enters an elevator and is stabbed by Bogeyman before awakening. He gets a ride from what I assume to be Travis, and wakes up. As he enters town, he finds that the place he grew up in isn't as it should be, his mother's house looks like a miserable condition as to be honest, so is the rest of the town. Alex struggles to understand what is going on as the game unfolds, Alex finds his way to the mayor, Sam Bartlett and asks him about his son, where the mayor is swiftly killed by the first boss, this kind of goes on in this weird cycle, and afterwords Alex ends up with the Police Officer Wheeler. Elle poofs out of nowhere and calls to say that she is coming to the police station, meanwhile you're struggling to survive monster attacks. As Elle arrives, you are forced to protect her from Siam, then you enter the sewers. This part was hard! Lacking ammo, and health, I clumsily made my way about, finally getting passed the spider enemies, and another Siam to reach the end of the sewers, Alex, and Elle get separated, and then Alex heads off towards Dr. Fitch's office, seeing that the man has a scalpel in his hand, Alex questions him, then pursues him inside. Alex then enters another Otherworld sequence, in which he chases his brother again, he then stumbles upon a cut up Dr. Fitch, the good doctor is given his daughter's doll before the second boss, Scarlet, bites his head off. After killing the boss, Alex heads to Town Hall, he then finds the dagger that he remembers being the handle to the door in his basement, he then finds his way into the graveyard that you go through at the beginning of the game. This leads to Alex going back home and discovering something in the attic, he then questions his mother about it, and then she gets abducted by .... ORDER SOLDIERS OH NOES!! D:
Alex goes into another Otherworld sequence in which he breaks down the Otherworld by solving puzzles, then escapes. He meets up with Elle, who says that her mother is missing or something, then he gets in contact with Wheeler to take them to Silent Hill by boat. Halfway there, ORDER SOLDIERS abduct Wheeler, and Elle, leading to Alex Shipwrecking on the shores of Toluca Lake. He then finds his way around town to break both of them out of the penitentiary that the Cult took them to.
After breaking Wheeler out, they walk together for a bit to where Wheeler takes control of the prison gates, which ends in yet another quick Otherworld sequence once you either spare, or kill your mother. You end up getting inside the church, and then find your way through it, your father is later killed by the Bogeyman, Movie Pyramid Head basically, but before this occurs, it is found out that you never really were a soldier, your father says that you were in an asylum, and that those were his dog tags you had on. Alex ends up going through and fighting the third boss, Asphyxia. Wheeler is abducted, once you kill the third boss, you awake tied to a chair by Margaret Holloway, and you fight your way out. Then proceed to save Elle from being sawed apart. After a long journey of escaping, you find your way to Wheeler, whom you either choose to heal, or kill. The choice of whether or not to mercy kill your mother, To either forgive, or not forgive your father, and whether to save Wheeler or not all impact the game's ending. Once you get to the end, you face the final boss, Amnion. By this point you find out how Alex really killed his younger brother, how he wasn't really a soldier, how his father and mother disobeyed the covenant in Shepherd's Glen, , you get an ending, the end. Now onwards to my point.
The Music:- 10/10 Akira Yamaoka and Mary Elizabeth Glenn provide good music to entice the atmosphere as always.
The Graphics:- 5/10 I can't really give them too much slack here, for one: The blood that floods the floor during the second boss fight looks pretty terrible, it's highly unrealistic, for one, it's too light, two, the wounds on Dr. Fitch looks as if somebody scrawled all over him with red marker, the same can be said for most enemies you attack. A lot of the textures in many areas lack good bump maps, and the street upon easy, not just close analysis looks very unrealistic. Alex's jacket looks kind of awkward, and not as detailed as past protagonists, graphic wise, the gold standard would probably be Silent Hill 3 for me. To be honest, aside from the lighting, and to some extent, a few good bump maps here and there, it's kind of laughable, even in comparison to the Silent Hill 4, which had this problem quite often.
Look at the ground carefully in this photo, it doesn't look very well done.
The Gameplay:-
4/10
Very different, even from the Room's standards, the gameplay is very difficult because the control system is so different. The needing to dodge, and block enemies so often is a pain in the butt that shouldn't have the need of being included in a Silent Hill game. Alex has finishing moves that he can preform with his melee weapons, though they make him slow, especially with the Fire Axe. Most of the time, the enemies either hit you before you can even bother with it, or completely block you. Many enemies truly are easier to kill with a gun, but Alex cannot carry much ammo in this game. Much less so than Henry, he can carry nine bullets for his handgun, and about the same for his other weapons, until he gets upgraded versions of them, which have about a few more bullets. By this time, you start to get items, and ammo more frequently if you know where to look for them. The way you use the guns is pretty bad, you aim like you're in some kind of game like Dead Rising, it's a very bad design for this series in particular, and makes it hard to focus the gun in a way like the other games. The on screen button prompts, the particular ways you have to kill most of the bosses, and the button mashing really takes down the gameplay score here. You have to constantly backtrack around in this game, which doesn't tick me off too much until you get to the graveyard the second time after going through the underground area of town hall, I had let my game sit for a bit, and I had turned it off, saving would've required me going outside of the Shepherd family house I believe, and I had to navigate my way all through the graveyard again, rebreak the boards for the upgraded handgun, then navigate through it again, it was pretty much a maze to do all these things. xd Nothing too serious to me though, the most annoying aspects is how they changed things from the other games, and the storyline, though this was a meh, thing to do.
Storyline:- 5/10
Very average, yet contradictory to the other games in several ways. 1: The Otherworld in the previous games didn't work like dimensional changes, they were projections of the mind, the only difference being the dream sequence Harry has in the first game when he goes to, and from Alchemilla Hospital.
Another one, is the Cybil reference, it kind of reminded me of the movie.
The Order Soldiers. Since when did the Cult fight with minions? Human minions? Why is the map of Silent Hill so different from the first game, if this is supposed to be Paleville? Since when was Alchemilla Hospital an asylum?
They should have gone with Brookhaven Hospital to be honest.
And furthermore, what happened to the police station from the first game? Or any of the surrounding buildings of Old Silent Hill? And that's another thing, it seems to hold scraps, and pieces of that on the map, but doesn't take care to really notice the town's geographical features from the previous games. Alex clearly states that ash is falling, and the cracks in the ground in Silent Hill, the Nurses, Order Soldiers, and the Bogeyman all are from the movie.
You can clearly see that if you look at their designs.
The story itself is very short when you think of it, it actually holds little story at all, the main plot being very expected, and brought out in the very end of the game. My main problem with this is that no furthering in the story was made with this game, all that is said is that there is another area near Silent Hill where a bunch of cult members trying to stay out of the affairs of the town made a covenant to avoid wrath from their "God", I don't recall Margaret wanting to expand the cult, but simply keep her town away from the wrath, however in case I missed something, it still is just a bad reference to the other games that makes me say: "Why am I playing this one?"
This is a poorly-written side-story, and to be honest, it didn't even feel like a Silent Hill game to me.
Weapon Selection:- 7/10
The Combat Knife, Pipe, Fire Axe, Handgun, Rifle, Shotgun, are very typical of the Silent Hill series, and are okay, but the way you use each weapon isn't quite as fun as it would be in previous titles.
Puzzles:- Eww.... 5/10 Sorry but I really got to go with Twinrealitychannel with this one, for one, the puzzles range from horrendously obvious, and easy, to, in my opinion only one that really racks the difficulty way way up, though there are some slightly challenging ones, but never did I get ever truly stumped in-game till the end.
The Hell house puzzles are simple enough, most of the items you need to solve the puzzles can be found within a close proximity of the puzzle, much more so than past entries, this kind of thing happens a lot in Homecoming, even from the beginning of the game.
The Mask Puzzle in the hell house gives you a false mask, that didn't really throw me off considering what the description of the bodies had on them, though it wasn't the easiest area of the game. But definitely easy enough that I could breeze through it in half an hour. There are tons of puzzles like this in the hell house, all are unlocked by rotating valve to a certain level, which locks some doors, while opening others. Then there is another one which involves sticking a few knives in particular locations, pretty simple. Then you have one that makes you place military medals on a jacket in particular order, this is very simple, and pretty easy to do, no problems at all.
Then you get a Robbie doll. 8D *Finds spot in wall to place, places* SHAZAM ALL THE DOORS UNLOCK!
The penitentiary riddle had me for a minute or two, until I realized what it was asking for, once you understand which side is which, it's not that hard at all.
Oh my goodness... The Shepherd puzzle..... It was an obvious puzzle, but I will admit getting it in the right order had me for a little bit before solving, nothing severely difficult.
This was pretty obvious if you found the note just before this so... XDDD
The birthstone puzzle wasn't entirely complicated, it was simple enough, but finding all the stones made me look hard for a bit.
The organ puzzle again was one that was pretty obvious of which order things went in once you got all the pieces, finding them was fairly easy, the two Siams made this "entertaining" though...
OH NOES! D: This had me like WTF DO I DO!! to the point where I lazily got on the computer and searched up the combination for it, definitely difficult, and this right here is probably what gets this up to a five rating.
Replay Value:- 5/10 Again, about average, the added weapons are the Laser Pistol, and the Circular Saw, you also get different costumes, certainly not many new weapon choices, whereas past titles had at least a few more additions for the most parts, but it's alright I guess.
Overall, the game ranges from poor, to average, and definitely was the start of sharp decline in this series. But you can't blame Double Helix Games for
all of the flaws in this game, I can say that they did try a bit, but it was for naught. They didn't really understand the Japanese feel for these games that made them scary in the past, and the actual lore hidden in the past games, they tried to combine Silent Hill 2, with the Movie, it turned out poorly, and was honestly not such a good move for them. I wonder how much Konami really tried to explain it to them when they offered the series up for grabs, if they focused more on giving it to promising game companies, instead of fresh American ones, you would honestly get a much better game. I can't think that any game can be perfect in every way, but with how Konami has been handling this game series as of late, not trusting the original game studio who made the past four games, causing them to get upset and for the most part disband really didn't work well for them. One has to wonder what is on their mind as they continue to make poor judgements. For example, the Silent Hill HD Collection was given to the task of people who never even worked on a game before, let alone an HD remake. Now don't get me wrong, there is American potential, if you know where to look, but they weren't trying... It's like if you were to throw something into the wind, and not care how it turns out. I'm sure that they made tons more money from the older games, than more recently, so what's with them continuing this horrendous trend they are going downwards in? Why shoot yourself in the foot Konami? Are you trying to destroy your business?
Alex Shepherd has been in the military for a long time, after so long, he is returning home to Shepherd's Glen, Alex starts the game off in an Asylum version of Alchemilla Hospital, where he makes his escape, he stumbles upon his younger brother, Joshua, and pursues him for as long as he can. At the end, he enters an elevator and is stabbed by Bogeyman before awakening. He gets a ride from what I assume to be Travis, and wakes up. As he enters town, he finds that the place he grew up in isn't as it should be, his mother's house looks like a miserable condition as to be honest, so is the rest of the town. Alex struggles to understand what is going on as the game unfolds, Alex finds his way to the mayor, Sam Bartlett and asks him about his son, where the mayor is swiftly killed by the first boss, this kind of goes on in this weird cycle, and afterwords Alex ends up with the Police Officer Wheeler. Elle poofs out of nowhere and calls to say that she is coming to the police station, meanwhile you're struggling to survive monster attacks. As Elle arrives, you are forced to protect her from Siam, then you enter the sewers. This part was hard! Lacking ammo, and health, I clumsily made my way about, finally getting passed the spider enemies, and another Siam to reach the end of the sewers, Alex, and Elle get separated, and then Alex heads off towards Dr. Fitch's office, seeing that the man has a scalpel in his hand, Alex questions him, then pursues him inside. Alex then enters another Otherworld sequence, in which he chases his brother again, he then stumbles upon a cut up Dr. Fitch, the good doctor is given his daughter's doll before the second boss, Scarlet, bites his head off. After killing the boss, Alex heads to Town Hall, he then finds the dagger that he remembers being the handle to the door in his basement, he then finds his way into the graveyard that you go through at the beginning of the game. This leads to Alex going back home and discovering something in the attic, he then questions his mother about it, and then she gets abducted by .... ORDER SOLDIERS OH NOES!! D:
Alex goes into another Otherworld sequence in which he breaks down the Otherworld by solving puzzles, then escapes. He meets up with Elle, who says that her mother is missing or something, then he gets in contact with Wheeler to take them to Silent Hill by boat. Halfway there, ORDER SOLDIERS abduct Wheeler, and Elle, leading to Alex Shipwrecking on the shores of Toluca Lake. He then finds his way around town to break both of them out of the penitentiary that the Cult took them to.
After breaking Wheeler out, they walk together for a bit to where Wheeler takes control of the prison gates, which ends in yet another quick Otherworld sequence once you either spare, or kill your mother. You end up getting inside the church, and then find your way through it, your father is later killed by the Bogeyman, Movie Pyramid Head basically, but before this occurs, it is found out that you never really were a soldier, your father says that you were in an asylum, and that those were his dog tags you had on. Alex ends up going through and fighting the third boss, Asphyxia. Wheeler is abducted, once you kill the third boss, you awake tied to a chair by Margaret Holloway, and you fight your way out. Then proceed to save Elle from being sawed apart. After a long journey of escaping, you find your way to Wheeler, whom you either choose to heal, or kill. The choice of whether or not to mercy kill your mother, To either forgive, or not forgive your father, and whether to save Wheeler or not all impact the game's ending. Once you get to the end, you face the final boss, Amnion. By this point you find out how Alex really killed his younger brother, how he wasn't really a soldier, how his father and mother disobeyed the covenant in Shepherd's Glen, , you get an ending, the end. Now onwards to my point.
The Music:- 10/10 Akira Yamaoka and Mary Elizabeth Glenn provide good music to entice the atmosphere as always.
The Graphics:- 5/10 I can't really give them too much slack here, for one: The blood that floods the floor during the second boss fight looks pretty terrible, it's highly unrealistic, for one, it's too light, two, the wounds on Dr. Fitch looks as if somebody scrawled all over him with red marker, the same can be said for most enemies you attack. A lot of the textures in many areas lack good bump maps, and the street upon easy, not just close analysis looks very unrealistic. Alex's jacket looks kind of awkward, and not as detailed as past protagonists, graphic wise, the gold standard would probably be Silent Hill 3 for me. To be honest, aside from the lighting, and to some extent, a few good bump maps here and there, it's kind of laughable, even in comparison to the Silent Hill 4, which had this problem quite often.
Look at the ground carefully in this photo, it doesn't look very well done.
The Gameplay:-
4/10
Very different, even from the Room's standards, the gameplay is very difficult because the control system is so different. The needing to dodge, and block enemies so often is a pain in the butt that shouldn't have the need of being included in a Silent Hill game. Alex has finishing moves that he can preform with his melee weapons, though they make him slow, especially with the Fire Axe. Most of the time, the enemies either hit you before you can even bother with it, or completely block you. Many enemies truly are easier to kill with a gun, but Alex cannot carry much ammo in this game. Much less so than Henry, he can carry nine bullets for his handgun, and about the same for his other weapons, until he gets upgraded versions of them, which have about a few more bullets. By this time, you start to get items, and ammo more frequently if you know where to look for them. The way you use the guns is pretty bad, you aim like you're in some kind of game like Dead Rising, it's a very bad design for this series in particular, and makes it hard to focus the gun in a way like the other games. The on screen button prompts, the particular ways you have to kill most of the bosses, and the button mashing really takes down the gameplay score here. You have to constantly backtrack around in this game, which doesn't tick me off too much until you get to the graveyard the second time after going through the underground area of town hall, I had let my game sit for a bit, and I had turned it off, saving would've required me going outside of the Shepherd family house I believe, and I had to navigate my way all through the graveyard again, rebreak the boards for the upgraded handgun, then navigate through it again, it was pretty much a maze to do all these things. xd Nothing too serious to me though, the most annoying aspects is how they changed things from the other games, and the storyline, though this was a meh, thing to do.
Storyline:- 5/10
Very average, yet contradictory to the other games in several ways. 1: The Otherworld in the previous games didn't work like dimensional changes, they were projections of the mind, the only difference being the dream sequence Harry has in the first game when he goes to, and from Alchemilla Hospital.
Another one, is the Cybil reference, it kind of reminded me of the movie.
The Order Soldiers. Since when did the Cult fight with minions? Human minions? Why is the map of Silent Hill so different from the first game, if this is supposed to be Paleville? Since when was Alchemilla Hospital an asylum?
They should have gone with Brookhaven Hospital to be honest.
And furthermore, what happened to the police station from the first game? Or any of the surrounding buildings of Old Silent Hill? And that's another thing, it seems to hold scraps, and pieces of that on the map, but doesn't take care to really notice the town's geographical features from the previous games. Alex clearly states that ash is falling, and the cracks in the ground in Silent Hill, the Nurses, Order Soldiers, and the Bogeyman all are from the movie.
You can clearly see that if you look at their designs.
The story itself is very short when you think of it, it actually holds little story at all, the main plot being very expected, and brought out in the very end of the game. My main problem with this is that no furthering in the story was made with this game, all that is said is that there is another area near Silent Hill where a bunch of cult members trying to stay out of the affairs of the town made a covenant to avoid wrath from their "God", I don't recall Margaret wanting to expand the cult, but simply keep her town away from the wrath, however in case I missed something, it still is just a bad reference to the other games that makes me say: "Why am I playing this one?"
This is a poorly-written side-story, and to be honest, it didn't even feel like a Silent Hill game to me.
Weapon Selection:- 7/10
The Combat Knife, Pipe, Fire Axe, Handgun, Rifle, Shotgun, are very typical of the Silent Hill series, and are okay, but the way you use each weapon isn't quite as fun as it would be in previous titles.
Puzzles:- Eww.... 5/10 Sorry but I really got to go with Twinrealitychannel with this one, for one, the puzzles range from horrendously obvious, and easy, to, in my opinion only one that really racks the difficulty way way up, though there are some slightly challenging ones, but never did I get ever truly stumped in-game till the end.
The Hell house puzzles are simple enough, most of the items you need to solve the puzzles can be found within a close proximity of the puzzle, much more so than past entries, this kind of thing happens a lot in Homecoming, even from the beginning of the game.
The Mask Puzzle in the hell house gives you a false mask, that didn't really throw me off considering what the description of the bodies had on them, though it wasn't the easiest area of the game. But definitely easy enough that I could breeze through it in half an hour. There are tons of puzzles like this in the hell house, all are unlocked by rotating valve to a certain level, which locks some doors, while opening others. Then there is another one which involves sticking a few knives in particular locations, pretty simple. Then you have one that makes you place military medals on a jacket in particular order, this is very simple, and pretty easy to do, no problems at all.
Then you get a Robbie doll. 8D *Finds spot in wall to place, places* SHAZAM ALL THE DOORS UNLOCK!
The penitentiary riddle had me for a minute or two, until I realized what it was asking for, once you understand which side is which, it's not that hard at all.
Oh my goodness... The Shepherd puzzle..... It was an obvious puzzle, but I will admit getting it in the right order had me for a little bit before solving, nothing severely difficult.
This was pretty obvious if you found the note just before this so... XDDD
The birthstone puzzle wasn't entirely complicated, it was simple enough, but finding all the stones made me look hard for a bit.
The organ puzzle again was one that was pretty obvious of which order things went in once you got all the pieces, finding them was fairly easy, the two Siams made this "entertaining" though...
OH NOES! D: This had me like WTF DO I DO!! to the point where I lazily got on the computer and searched up the combination for it, definitely difficult, and this right here is probably what gets this up to a five rating.
Replay Value:- 5/10 Again, about average, the added weapons are the Laser Pistol, and the Circular Saw, you also get different costumes, certainly not many new weapon choices, whereas past titles had at least a few more additions for the most parts, but it's alright I guess.
Overall, the game ranges from poor, to average, and definitely was the start of sharp decline in this series. But you can't blame Double Helix Games for
all of the flaws in this game, I can say that they did try a bit, but it was for naught. They didn't really understand the Japanese feel for these games that made them scary in the past, and the actual lore hidden in the past games, they tried to combine Silent Hill 2, with the Movie, it turned out poorly, and was honestly not such a good move for them. I wonder how much Konami really tried to explain it to them when they offered the series up for grabs, if they focused more on giving it to promising game companies, instead of fresh American ones, you would honestly get a much better game. I can't think that any game can be perfect in every way, but with how Konami has been handling this game series as of late, not trusting the original game studio who made the past four games, causing them to get upset and for the most part disband really didn't work well for them. One has to wonder what is on their mind as they continue to make poor judgements. For example, the Silent Hill HD Collection was given to the task of people who never even worked on a game before, let alone an HD remake. Now don't get me wrong, there is American potential, if you know where to look, but they weren't trying... It's like if you were to throw something into the wind, and not care how it turns out. I'm sure that they made tons more money from the older games, than more recently, so what's with them continuing this horrendous trend they are going downwards in? Why shoot yourself in the foot Konami? Are you trying to destroy your business?
