 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | Double Helix |
| Publisher: | Konami | |
| Genre: | Survival Horror | |
| ESRB: | Mature | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p | |
| Buy Now: |   |
When the Silent Hill series shifted development teams away from Konami’s own Team Silent to Climax Studios in Silent Hill: 0rigins, things suddenly because a lot more action-oriented. New hero Travis the trucker came armed to the teeth with an athletic body and weapons including virtually everything not nailed down, and suddenly it wasn’t quite so necessary to avoid those nurses and grotesque monsters roaming Silent Hill’s foggy streets. The first current-gen installment in the series expands upon this new action-oriented direction, while keeping the scares intact.
Silent Hill: Homecoming focuses on Alex Shepherd, recently returned home to Shepherd’s Glen after several years away. Shepherd’s Glen has the unfortunate pleasure of being just down the road from the town of Silent Hill, and as a result the Shepherd's Glen Alex returns to is not the same as the one he left. The town is covered in a thick fog, streets suddenly dead end into a pit of nothingness, and the town is mostly deserted aside from the various abominations now roaming the streets. Alex’s mission is to survive while finding his brother Joshua, and of course he must answer some questions about himself along the way.
Overall I found the storyline to be OK, but the “twists” were relatively mild and fairly predictable compared to past installments. It’s still pretty disturbing and engaging, but not very shocking. It also feels like more of a side-story than a true sequel (which is probably why Konami changed the name from Silent Hill V), although that’s partly due to the new setting of Shepherd’s Glen. It also somewhat depends on which of the five different endings you get on your initial playthrough of the game, because a couple of them give context to the overall storyline that changes the meaning of key storyline events quite a bit.
As Alex searches for his brother, he’ll find several different weapons to use in his fight for survival, including several different types of guns, a crowbar, a knife, etc. These weapons are mostly series standards, but unlike 0rigins they don’t break like porcelain plates after a few hits. Once Alex finds a weapon, it’s his to use for the duration of the game. I like this change back to the way things used to be, because it was pretty silly for Travis to carry around a couple dozen weapons in 0rigins at any given time, including objects like IV drip stands that inexplicably broke after three or four blows to an enemy.
Combat itself has also been refined in this game, taking the ideas presented in 0rigins and implementing several changes to combat. The biggest change is that dodging now plays a major role. Properly dodging enemy attacks often opens that enemy up to a brutal counter-attack, whereas attacks not dodged will do significant damage to Alex. Since health drinks and med kits are relatively scarce, the player simply cannot try to use brute force to get through the game. This is especially true since enemy attacks are usually much tougher to avoid than they were in past Silent Hill games.
Posted: 2009-01-13 18:58:12 PST