Silent Hill 3 is hard to hate because it offers a lot to love in one spooky package.
The premise takes a turn for the different as we control the spunky teenager Heather who finds herself reaching the end of her mall shopping (or in this case window shopping seeing how she apparently doesn't buy anything in her excursion except French fries) when she encounters a shady old man named Douglas Cartland who claims to be a detective. Although she evades the big guy all right, she suddenly finds the shopping mall she's in to be bizarrely empty within minutes and the only person she does find is dead... and being feasted on by an enormous grotesque monster. From there, Heather encounters an even stranger stranger named Claudia who apparently knows what's happening. Upon meeting her however, Heather finds herself in pain as she follows the mysterious woman into a world of blood thirsty nightmares.
It is a little strange how this game doesn't start off in the title town, but not wishing to leave every bit of info out you do end up physically going to Silent Hill (and not just visiting two alternate memory-based versions of it via the holes of Craig Schwartz' apartment if you know what I mean), so at least you can't bop SH3 for being inconsistent. However, it is interesting to note that of the Silent Hill games released Silent Hill 3 is just about the only one that serves as an actual sequel to one of its predecessors and it's called '3' solely because its the third game in the series. But being the only one game related to any of its predecessors beyond just taking place in the town and calling it by the sequence it appears in is a little bewildering. It was like when the Gun Frontier Team gave Metal Black the sub-title of 'Gun Frontier 2' only because it was the second game the team made and I feel like a total nerd, but I digress.
I'll admit, the controls to the Silent Hill franchise have never been spectacular to mention (though nowhere near unplayable or bad as most dolts tend to claim), it's interesting to note that the controls in SH3 feel as though they've been tuned in areas that needed it, but simultaneously detracting from other areas that didn't. For instance, Heather handles pretty well in movement and speed, she picks up items relatively quick, is good at enemy evasion and for a seventeen year old girl, she seems to have some kind of knack for aiming firearms, though realistically she doesn't handle the recoil of each gun as well, so there's that balance.
On the other hand however, Heather seems to suck at melee weapon fighting which as realistic as this is it's hard to accept. First off, the monsters in SH3 are tough. Tough to the point where you'd think you were fighting robots made of a chemical mixture of steel, diamond and bits of the Earth's core. A standard enemy can take up to six knife stabs in order to die and even after death you have to continually kick its corpse in order to walk past it. This may sound like a hollow complaint, but it's very frustrating when you're trying to conserve ammunition and have to fight your way through monstrous enemies who seem to require an anti-tank round to the head before dying and the heroine just can't swing the knife or pipe fast or hard enough in self-defense. Even after killing waves of monsters, you'll find yourself blocked in a corner by their bodies and have to wait a few minutes for them to deflate before continuing.
Speaking of which, you can pretty much look upon SH3's monsters to be supernaturally obnoxious for how many non-sensical abilities they're offered such as boss enemies that can block bullets the very second they're fired. It also wasn't a good idea to have a flying enemy that seems to fly through nonsensical means (I didn't know that gluing two torsos with blades on their heads could fly) and seems to only be destructible via rapid fire or buckshot. Of course some of this cheapness can be balanced by Konami's idiotic pretentious idea that enemy bullets (thankfully few otherwise the game wouldn't be scary) no longer bring your character to one-hit point of health.
And before I lose track, I should say that the ability to 'finish off' a wounded, dying monster has suddenly turned into a necessity here as whenever you fail to drive your patent leather Go-Go boots down on an enemy's head, they come back for more pain despite how many times you cracked its face with a steel pipe. However, if you do happen to give the dying monster a gentle Joe Pesci style kick to the face, the creature dies instantly.
Also, remember how in Restless Dreams how you could block attacks by holding the run button and more often than not James would effectively reflect the attack? Well Konami 'modified' this approach by making the block button harder to use, meaning that when you're in attack position and you hold the run button to block, Heather will assume blocking position for about ONE SECOND before automatically going back to attack position. This all means that you have to time your blocks in order to avoid getting a whack on the head and considering how erratic your enemies are, it gets very frustrating having to time one attack after the other.
The game play does manage to throw in some nifty though subtle innovations to the series however as your inventory is arranged into three categories of items such as books, keys and puzzle objects, weapons and supplies for health and ammunition. You also have the ability to equip items that allow you to use them in real-time a la Deep Fear by equipping said item and pressing the right thumb stick in to use it. On an even lighter note, the puzzles remain just as clever and challenging as they were in the previous game which is good as a break from adventure and action and it's fun when your brain is being teased on personal AND intellectual levels.
As far as sound goes, SH3 does just as good as its predecessors by adding the detail of various sounds to the tiniest events and actions on and even off-screen. Apparently the game invests in adding sounds to the unseen such as adding the haunting distant roars or mournful moans of tortured monsters which makes you want to pause in whatever you're doing and listen because said moans and roars are sometimes masked by our own footsteps. And that's fine, because it all adds to the game's atmosphere. If anything it adds a stapled page to the atmospheric points of its predecessors by adding to one atmospheric aspect and at times making it feel wholesome and new.
However, there is one qualm I have to add with this, that being the re-using of the option sounds from Silent Hill 2. Oh sure there are a few new sounds such as the 'bloop' of shifting from inventory categories, but for the most part everything Heather picks up or chooses in options are all the same from when James did. If anything, it just makes the sound department look a wee bit lazy, but it's easy to forgive.
The music is once again composed by Akira Yamaoka, famous for his work in previous Konami games such as Gradius and Sparkster and he proves to be proficient in the ambient pseudo-industrial nightmare music of SH3. The composition of intense and atmospheric songs in SH3 remains the same as it always has which does so to keep us on our toes and alert at all times. There seems to be a few blatant re-used songs from SH2 similar to that of the sounds, yet most of these songs were the songs in SH2 you could only hear if you cranked up the volume a bit.
Still, the music keeps up the tradition of the game's use of atmosphere and drama by making us fearful and mournful of the transpiring events and some of the character songs and dramatic moments are so well composed they're almost beautiful. This is the first game in the series to use more than one non-instrumental song and the vocals are used to great potential here, especially in moments of exposition between characters.
While on the topic of audio, the voice acting is quite good and it manages to convey the characters emotions and personalities perfectly. There are a few moments where the actors don't exactly match the character's emotional movements like when Heather speaks verbally and physically with her arms out and her eyes wide and the line is delivered a tone too softly, but again, such a fault is tiny compared to the rest of the performances.
While on the subject however, there's just one thing that bothers me: why did they give the obvious antagonist an English accent? I mean sure we don't get a lot of background info on the person to answer this question, but I think it's still a questionable design choice, especially seeing how we hear the voice of that person's father later in the game only to discover he possesses a VERY obvious American accent. Guess they had to throw in one racial stereotype somewhere...
The graphics to SH3 are quite lovely as the details of character's skin complexion comes out magnificently and there are few parts that lack visual detail. If anything a sense of mild laziness reappears in some of the items as once again the shotgun and pistol designs that were used in SH2 are reused here and much like the previous Playstation/2 released games, the flash light still offers blocks of white light around the corners of the light itself, something that the X-Box version of SH2 - Restless Dreams - fixed.
As stated before, the atmosphere to Silent Hill 3 offers a few new aspects and techniques such as sound, but for the most part features the same successful mind-scrambling audio-visual horror that psychologic/spiritual evil that is the stable of the series and it comes in just as strong as its predecessors. If anything, it continues the efforts of invading personal territory which ends up being pivotal to the plot and the invasion is balanced out so that the personal invasion is not exploited and dulled down.
If anything the heroine tends to occasionally detract from the atmosphere due to her smug and wise-cracking latch-key kid attitude, yet despite her efforts she manages to balance it out so it doesn't feel like the atmosphere is literally gobbled up and regurgitated by the mouth of a gun-totting, muscle-bound patriotic action hero or at the very least isn't taunted with quiet humor from the fearless cast of Martian Gothic.
The Silent Hill series has done a great job of making us sympathize with the protagonist and get a very good feel of their supporting and even antagonistic characters and SH3 continues that effort with sparks of elegance. Heather is a perfectly flawed person that as judgmental and untrusting as she is, the more you play the game as her and experience what she does, it becomes increasingly hard to hate her. And even though this has the smallest cast of characters for a Silent Hill game, you know it's good when you discover the internal struggles each characters has to face.
In conclusion, Silent Hill 3 is a fantastic addition to the series, though if anything really degrades it, it has to be the notable decline in replay value because as fun and creepy as the game is, it's hard to logically find oneself playing the game to constantly unlock more variations of the same stuff you all ready unlock like extra game difficulties (at least they spelled 'Extreme' right) rather than a multitude of endings or extra memos. Though the notable points of re-usage and occasional continuity errors are a little discouraging, the depth of the story and characters make for a very effective experience and the game still manages to be terrifying on the same and different levels. So take this as a recommendation if you're looking for a good survival-horror/horror-adventure game from the 2000 decade and you like a little thought added to your gaming experience.