A Game that will take you to the core of your soul while you explore your own personal fear and disires.
The gameplay of Silent Hill homecoming is solid, with a few minor frustrating moments that you can overlook for the better whole. Starting off in nightmare strapped down to a hospital gerny, you have to use the now normal game mechanic, of God of War key mashing to free yourself, once free you will notice a big change with the jump to the next gen platform, camera angle, the camera is now a free flowing system that can be controlled with the right stick making the camera ten times better then any Silent Hill before it. The character moves around well, will no stop and turn actions, everything is smooth and feels like something a human would do.
The graphics are great, although somewhat washed in some areas, and I wasnt too happy with the overuse of the post processing effects (grain) that they used in the game to wash everything made me feel like I was playing the game on a bad tv set with a blank screen playing in the backround. Lighting and shadows where great and found that I scared myself with my own players shadow( a first I swear) while walking down a dark hallway with a light source behind me my own player shadow twisted shape making me think just for a sec that a monster lerked in the shadows in front of me. Character models look great although I somewhat miss the lack of "twisted" looking voice actors that they had in the last game, they dont look undead this time around and look like normal people not pale vampires or walking cgi manakins. Enemies are great to look at and slashing hitting shooting something leaves marks on them so you get to see where the heck you slashed the nurse, a nice touch making me wonder why other games only show small gunshot wounds but never the knife slashes.
Sound is a mix for me although the music is good, some of the music selections were not, such as the enemy near music that just gives me a headache and makes me want to mute the tv (grundge industrial sounding music)voiced music is dark and great and fits the game well giving a more gothic loss of hope feeling as you walk around, making you think of better days gone by.
The game is not overly hard and I found that I had a easier time going around the town then in last games, and found monster encounters not overly rampid, so you wont have to worry about having to fight something every 10 steps although I sometimes found it a little barren in parts when I just wanted to shoot something.
I only had two problems with the game, one the save points where to far spread apart compared to other games, I found that I had to overplay wwhen all I wanted to do was go to the store and got me worried that I would have to replay a large part of the area if I died. The other is the way the game handles firearms, I found that as the developers stated that person came from the army yet I found it hard to hit anything with my handgun, since the gun system isnt auto targeting but more of a RE4 type system making hitting dogs are swaying foggers hard running out of rounds way to fast short.
All in all its a great addition to the series, with good looking graphics good sound, and great gamplay, and a world where everything you hit X to has a explanation from a painting to a lamp. This game should be played by anyone who loves a good horror, and if your a fan of the Silent Hill franchise, its worth owning or at least a good weeks rent.