Previous chapters of the series knew to have monsters that looked more generic, so that seeing them over and over wouldn’t feel like you were running into the exact same individual enemy. Making this worse is that with one notable exception-the very cleverly designed Dolls-they’re all not only boring in concept, but too individually styled to be reused as often as they are. Downpour suffers from a horrible lack of enemy offerings outside of a couple of bosses, you’ll only ever encounter five different kinds of standard monsters in your travels through Silent Hill. Here, it would be excusable if at least what you were fighting was fun. Really, though-combat has always been mediocre at best in the Silent Hill series. Unfortunately, when lead protagonist Murphy Pendleton picks up a melee weapon and chases after the closest hell spawn, attacking feel awkward and just never quite right, and you’ll find yourself wishing for options like better lock-on and the ability to side step. Did that experiment at least lead to better combat concepts here in Downpour? Sadly, no-though the game does throw far fewer encounters at us than I was first expecting. Shattered Memories tried to answer complaints of Homecoming’s combat-heavy gameplay by getting rid of it entirely, but that idea never panned out as it should have. Silent Hill Downpour has problems-the most glaring of which is nearly everything centered around its combat offerings. It’s important to remember those two games, because they set up the world that Downpour found itself in: That of being seen almost a restart for developing a high-definition Silent Hill, and a return to the more traditional ideas of the franchise after the previous game’s radical shift. The ideas presented in Shattered Memories were daring and dramatic, but the end result was a project which-for me-utterly failed to present or understand most of the things I as a fan was wanting from the game (and the series as a whole). Shattered Memories took gigantic risks, eschewing game-spanning combat for segments where protagonist Harry Mason had no option but to run from his foes-and then focusing the rest of its efforts around exploration, story revelation, and character drama. After a few play-throughs, the game did end up somewhat growing on me-but it was still painfully obvious that everything about it felt like an uninspired and by-the-books attempt at making a major new Silent Hill chapter via a Western developer.Ī year later, we got Silent Hill: Shattered Memories-a game which would become hugely divisive among the community. Unfortunately, for all of the pent-up demand that existed for a new chapter of the series to be released for current-gen consoles, Homecoming was seen as a huge disappointment by fans and critics alike. The first official launch of the Silent Hill franchise for HD consoles was 2008’s Silent Hill Homecoming. Silent Hill Downpour isn’t quite the mess that Rule of Rose was-and yet, because of it, I find myself in a very similar predicament. My head told me that I couldn’t give it any sort of decent grade, because it wasn’t a great game at the same time, my heart begged me to do the right thing and give it a higher score, because it was a fantastic experience. (In fact, I had the chance to speak to the man responsible for most of those very elements-Yoshiro Kimura-at GDC, and he didn’t hesitate to agree with the game’s failings.) When it came time to review Rule of Rose and give it a final score, I was utterly torn. So many of the game’s core concepts were utterly terrible-and yet, its story, its characters, its scenarios, its atmosphere, and its music were all amazing in their owns special ways. It’s games like Silent Hill Downpour that make people like me hate attaching scores to reviews.īack many years ago, I reviewed another survivor horror adventure: A PlayStation 2 release called Rule of Rose.
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