While the story and atmosphere known from the previous titles are still there, the gameplay degraded.
While the previous games in the series played almost flawlessly (including the first one on an emulator), The Room indeed plays...how to put it...not well at all. Sure, the controls scheme and retarded camera are a big part of all the games in the series. That's a valid argument no doubt. However, there is something very different about the fourth game after all! And what's that you ask? Henry. In the previous titles the controls were intuitive and the characters were reacting on time, with logic and reliably. Henry, on the contrary, reacts to pretty much every command with about an hour delay, including the combat pose, which alone causes a great load of frustration. But when the camera joins the party...that's when it really gets out of hand. This game's camera is a total bi@ch, which literally ALWAYS looks in a completely different direction than you want her to, and even though there's this fabulous key to change the camera angle, this change usually consists of mere inchy twitch to the side. Yeah, that always saves the day. In the previous games the camera had basically the same nature, but at least it was able to sort of conform, or it was looking exactly where it should be looking.
Another cool gameplay feature is the combat system. In it's core it's the same thing as with the previous game, only with one fantastic difference - in here it's just about 65456168616516 times slower. And not only that - Henry has this amazing spider sense and so whenever he feels like it, he automatically switches from enemy to enemy ALWAYS when you don't want him to do it, and when you happen to want him to do it, Henry just keeps on confidently focusing on a fallen enemy completely ignoring the monkey sneaking behind him. But the greatest fun takes place when you have to confront a group of, say, five big strong enemies and you're supposed to take them all out using a combat system clearly designed for one-on-one confrontations. There are no tactics or strategy thinking to occupy your mind during these. You have to rely exclusively on your own luck.
On the other side of the coin it's quite shiny, though. The story, while pretty far away from the roots of the series, is still damn powerful and damn complicated. The atmosphere works most of the times, although it can't really compare to either of the previous titles. Most of the local monsters are nice, albeit I truly missed some of the more typical silenthilly ones I was used to from before (and some monsters are just plain humorous, like those overgrown blurping nurses).
One gets scared from time to time, here and there they can tell it's still Silent Hill they're in, but more than anything they're frustrated and bored. It's not quite as much of a failure as Homecoming was, but it's pretty close. I'm holding on a fairly high rating because...oh I dunno, guess I wanna be kind.
+ The atmosphere, most of the monsters, working scares here and there, the story, nice graphics
- Boring gameplay (no puzzles, just increasing numbers of enemies), the controls plus camera, the combat system, Henry's voice actor probably wasn't paid very well (if at all), no dimensional transformations, Eileen is annoying BIG TIME