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Silent Hill: Homecoming—Why so much Hate?! Silent Hill: Homecoming, or Silent Hill 6, has been receiving a lot of horribly negative reviews as of late, but it really isn’t all that bad!!! Sure, it doesn’t exactly live up to the hype during pre-release or make true use of today’s powerhouse consoles, but bottom line—it’s Silent Hill and still fun to play! Perhaps the release of the Silent Hill movie provided some inspiration for the game, in that the goal was to go for mediocre instead of great. Obviously, there are a ton of problems with game, which is mostly what I’ll be covering, but hopefully this will shed some light for developers on where to NOT take the Silent Hill series in the future.
You start off in a familiar setting for the Silent Hill games—a confusing nightmare of sorts. The player you control (Alex) is in a creepy hospital trying to find his annoying little brother. After a tedious search for his bother's favorite stuffed bunny, Alex wakes up in the cab of a truck driven by the main character of Silent Hill: Origins (PSP) who is taking him to the town of Sheppard's Glen (Alex’s hometown), which is strangely covered in that typical Silent Hill-esque fog. Upon returning to his childhood house, he discovers his mother has gone nuts, his brother is missing, as well as most of the town…and so his decent in to hell begins.
The main problem with this game is that it really isn’t all that scary, possibly due to the new combat mechanic. Unlike previous SH games, Alex has is able to fight back quite well, which is ingeniously explained by his previous military experience. The only real addition to the combat scheme is the ability to dodge and perform basic combos. You really no longer feel scared to death as you run through claustrophobic hallways trying to avoid the terrible things hell is throwing at you, as that whole avoidance thing is…avoided. Aside from the extremely weak combat system--which is really more of a timing mini-game--the graphics are simply laughable. This does not look even halfway as good as the top-tier Playstation 3 and XBox 360 games out today. If anything, the realism is comparable to that of SH's PS2 titles. With that said, there are some areas really do look great, like a small doctor’s office jam-packed with all sorts of little decrepit details and incredible lighting throughout. Aside from these brief moments of photo realism, the rest of the game simply looks like crap. The character models, monsters, furniture, etc. seem as if they were thrown together rapidly to only meet a deadline. I know Silent Hill games are suppose to be dark and all, but I have to go with what a lot of people are saying--this is far too dark. It’s incredibly annoying when you traverse through the hell-transformed areas, as you simply can’t see shit. It’s almost as if the developers were hiding something: horrible texturing and modeling perhaps? The only other problem here is the sound work, which is pretty terrible to put it lightly. For some reason, they decided to choose a reverb with an extremely high frequency brightness, which results in your footsteps sounding like a hammer hitting an anvil within a large cathedral. This reverb is unfortunately found in many of the indoor areas you will visit, including almost all of the hell-transformed levels. You’ll also notice a great sense of laziness with the mixing. Cutscenes will often be overpowered by atmospheric SFX, as character voices are usually covered in the previously mentioned death-verb and set to such a low volume that subtitles are a must.
Aside from the above issues that have possibly hurt the SH franchise from this point on, I still find enjoyment when traversing both the town of Sheppard’s Glen and eventually Silent Hill itself. Each environment is fairly unique and creepy, puzzles are definitely challenging, and some of the monsters are indeed frightening to a certain degree. Bottom line, it’s still Silent Hill at its core, but the new combat system definitely changes the overall dynamic of the game. Perhaps the Silent Hill movie (usually free with the purchase of Homecoming, btw) set a wimpy standard for the future of the franchise, but maybe from reviews like this and other more noteworthy sources will open the eyes of its developers and hopefully look to the roots of the original PSone game that spawned the terror we have come to love over the years.
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