Silent Hill: Homecoming is Konami's weakest installment in their long-running survival horror series.
You play as Alex Shepherd, an honorably discharged soldier who returns to Silent Hill's neighboring town Shepherd's Glen. The game immediately sets you in a hospital and exposes you to all sorts of nightmarish things but shortly after, you awake in a car; those nightmarish things were just that, a nightmare. Unfortunately, you quickly realize as you return home that parts of your nightmare have manifested into Shepherd's Glen, and your brother Joshua, as well as several other residents, have gone missing. Now you have to find your brother, and you'll ultimately discover the evil connections that exist between two villages of Shepherd's Glen and Silent Hill.
Let's just throw this out here right now. This is a very frustrating game. If you're not very good at survival horror games, consider playing something else. Homecoming's combat engine isn't exactly user-friendly, thanks to an unreliable dodge button. Some of the enemies attack very quickly, and they can hit pretty hard, so your reflexes have got to be tight, or you'll find yourself in a world of hurt. What doesn't help matters is that even on the default difficulty of Normal, ammo is very, very rare, so you're forced to melee a lot more than you'd want. Throw in a horrible camera system that refuses to right itself when you get cornered, and you've got a swear-inducing game on your hands.
Alex's arsenal consists of quick weapons such as a combat knife, heavy duty melee weapons such as pipes and axes, and firearms, such as handguns, shotguns and rifles. Each weapon's efficiency is determined by what kind of creature you're fighting. The skinless feral dogs are easy enough to handle with the knife, while shooting at the clobbering Siams with a rifle will stop them in their tracks. The cool thing about Homecoming's melee combat is that if you manage to stun an enemy by counterattacking after a successful dodge, Alex will pull off a brutal execution move. These moves weren't seen in previous Silent Hills, so it helps add to the viciousness of the game.
The enemy distribution in Silent Hill: Homecoming is very inconsistent. You can't walk down some streets without bumping into enemy after enemy, while in some unlit buildings, you can walk freely down the hallways and not fight a thing. One major issue is that the monsters respawn in certain areas, and are stashed in other areas that have no purpose to be visited. The game just doesn't give you enough ammo or health to fight everything in the game, and being forced to run away is discouraging to the player. Plus, you'll occasionally be pitted up against several of the same enemies at once, and it's very hard to escape these battles unscathed; it just seems that the game HAS to whittle away your health.
Fortunately for Silent Hill fans, the enemy designs are just as creepy and disturbing as always, with the feral dogs being the exception; they look like they were lifted right out of a Resident Evil game. The blind nurses have returned and are very fun to fight with the light off, and new enemies such as the razor-headed Schisms and the slithering Lurkers will freak you out a number of times. There's a dismaying lack of boss battles, though, but the bosses you do fight are about as twisted as you'll ever encounter. Even then, they fight pretty similarly to each other.
Puzzles have always been a staple of Silent Hill. They were cleverly crafted and pretty hard to solve, but the puzzles in Homecoming are rather disappointing. They're both uninspired and relatively easy to solve. One such puzzle is even reused later in the game, and is solved in exactly the same way.
One facet of Silent Hill that's beginning to grow old is the huge complexes the game puts you in that contains more locked doors than open ones. When you look at your map, you may be overwhelmed with just how big some of the levels are, but then you realize that two out of three doors you try to open are locked. The linearity of it all now becomes painfully obvious, and you lose the feeling of exploration, which is replaced by that of drudgery. By the way, the map even has issues where it won't display your location on a certain map, or won't even display a map of an area you know you have. These problems should have been caught in play testing.
The level designs themselves have that classic Silent Hill aesthetic to it. There exists two worlds in a Silent Hill game. You have your normal world, which is vacant and run down, and then you have the Otherworld, which is composed of bloodstained and rusted metals, leather tarps, steel mesh and other revolting materials. When Alex comes across a key segment in the game, the normal world peels away like a flaking painting and reveals the Otherworld beneath it. It's a very smooth transition, and one of the game's visual highlights.
The visuals overall are average. The strength of the graphics lie in the art direction, leaving the technical side a bit wanting. The textures aren't as sharp as they could be, looking very murky up close. The game also uses a film grain filter when in the Otherworld, but this only serves to make the game look worse. The major drawback is the game's most crucial tool, and that's the flashlight. It does a very poor job illuminating the area sometimes, and when combined with some really bad camera angles, you might as well be fighting invisible enemies. Another eye sore is the piss poor lip syncing. At its best, it looks like a theme park animatronic, and at its worst doesn't appear to be moving at all. The bottom line is that just about every area in the game's graphical department should have been much, much better.
Thankfully, the audio fares much better. Every Silent Hill game has been atmospheric and the most important part of atmosphere is the audio. The game's loaded with a lot of "bump in the night" sounds; things clattering over, foot steps, childrens' laughter; sounds you don't know where they're coming from or who's making them. The old radio static that alerts you an enemy is in the vicinity has returned, as well as the nerve-wracking soundtrack composed of metallic noises in a devil-worshipping cult-inspired rhythm. The only real drawback are the voice overs. It's not that everyone performs abysmally, it's just that some characters speak so incredibly soft, you'll miss some of what they say. As for performances in general, there really isn't any character that sounds great enough to earn an award; it's total standard fare.
Silent Hill: Homecoming is a game that only die-hard fans of the franchise need apply. Newcomers will find this to be a very cumbersome game to play, and they'll forever be lost in the game's already convoluted and confusing story. Fans of the genre can expect to be disappointed in the game's underwhelming visuals, but will appreciate some of the creative enemy design. The game also contains several moral decision making opportunities, which leads to different endings, so the gamer with enough time on his hands might be intrigued enough to play through again.