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SILENT HILL: HOMECOMING Posted by Dan Pearson on Feb 24, 2009 16:40 (Feb 24, 2009 16:40) |
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With Resident Evil 5 just around the corner, Konami along with Double Helix have another bash at the Silent Hill franchise, but does this game keep you up at night or should you give it the silent treatment.
The game starts off really strong, dropping you straight into familiar Silent Hill surroundings, a freaky as hell hospital with flaking walls, unsettling shadows and mad looking nurses. But it all turns out to be a dream your character Alex has whilst hitching a ride to his home town. After leaving town for the army Alex finds himself returning after being discharged. But home isn’t what it used to be, people are disappearing and there is a strange fog surrounding you. So you set off to find your brother Josh and find out what is going on. Controlling Alex is easy enough, LB and RB bring up weapons and items menus, RT readies an attack and locks on an enemy and the face buttons perform different attacks and dodges. New to the survival horror genre is the ability to control the camera, surprisingly this works and does not lose any suspense that a fixed camera brings. The dodging makes melee attacks a little easier to pull off, with some types of monsters you will learn to take out without getting a scratch. The bosses are real mixed bag, some you can take out with the very limited ammo you have stockpiled but others have so many styles and forms that you will be chugging medicine and praying for it to be over.  Like all other Silent Hill games it is based around puzzles, a small helping of action and a bucket load of scares. The scares come from all angles, tricks of the light, eerie shadows, warped inhabitants, your nerves are tested all of the time, dare you put your hand into a blood stained hole in the wall, just remind yourself it’s only a game. The soundtrack also plays tricks with your mind, chattering behind walls and a brain numbing white noise will bring you to the edge of madness in your own living room. Homecoming could have been one of the scariest games out there if it wasn’t for some appalling puzzles, coding and a weak story. One of the first puzzles requires you to get a water pump working in a flooded basement so Alex can unlock a bolted door. He knows where the bolt is but for some crazy reason will not put his hand in the water to slide it. Instead you need to go through a pointless journey to the garage to get fuel, only to find the canister is empty. Then you are stuck. There is no pointer to help out, you are left to you own devices to find fuel. By pure fluke I came across a truck hidden in an alley, ah ha, I think, pinch the fuel from the petrol tank. Then a lurcher springs from some dustbins, after a quick stabbing I go to the truck, only to find my path blocked by the dustbins scattered in the fight. There is no way to pick up or move them, I’m stuck, I know what I need but the game refuses to let me get to it. After 30 min of aimlessly wandering around I try the alley again, thankfully the alley has reset itself, lurcher and all, allowing me to dispose of it again and to carefully move around the bins and get the fuel. There are a few instances like this and it jars you back to reality with a jolt, causing all of that hard work with suspense to be wasted. I also have a problem with how accepting to the weirdness Alex is. He has a few questions like where is everyone but never really follows up on why there is a strange beast trying to kill him in his mum’s basement or why most of the doors in his house are locked. The bad thing is this all takes place in the first few hours of play and it does not get any better through the many hours of play time. It just feels very weak in the story department.  Although the last few paragraphs bad mouth Homecoming, there is a pull in this game that eats away the hours. After a few hours the gameplay seems to settle, the map starts to make sense and you start to get pointers as to where to go next. In the end Silent Hill Homecoming is as mad as a bag of spiders, the look and feel alone will chill you, but just like most scary games and films the story falls flat.
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