Silent Hill: Downpour (PS3/XB360): Caught out in the rain.

Last July, when I was trying to get some content into this school project of mine, I did a small preview piece for this release, but more than that it was more of a reflection on one of the greatest games I've ever played in Silent Hill 2. The major crux of the whole preview was that I wanted the folks at Konami to stop promising me that their next game will be as great as Silent Hill 2 was, because they just hit on almost every point they could with the game and its proven to be near impossible to repeat the magic. Well they have finally released the new title, and as a die hard fan of this series lets see how this one stacks up to the legend.

SILENT HILL: DOWNPOUR: (PS3)

The game opens with our protagonist Murphy Pendelton, who is currently serving a sentence for stealing a police cruiser, is being guided along the hallways of Ryall State Correctional Facility by an officer by the name of Sewell. As they approach what appears to be a showers, this officer clearly doesn't seem to be operating on the best ethics, as he informs Murphy that if all the showers are going it gets so steamy in there that the guards can't see whats happening on camera in there. Enter a fat, naked, and sequestered prisoner by the name of Patrick Napier, whom after a brief exchange with Murphy finds out they used to be neighbors. After this brief exchange of pleasantries, Murphy violently beats the shit out of Fatty McGee and murders him in the shower. The game cuts to Murphy in his cell, being taken out for transfer to a maximum security facility for his actions. On the drive to his new location the bus approaches the Silent Hill city limits, and because of the destroyed roads that surround them, the bus tips and tumbles down a ravine. Murphy awakens outside the bus with his cuffs removes and starts to make his escape into the town of Silent Hill. 

In my earlier preview of this game, I had made a comment about how great I thought the character models looked and how highly saturated the colors were. Well Konami has addressed this issue by making you view the entire game through a burlap sack of threshed grain. Look, I totally get that the theme of the game is supposed to be dark and grainy. Its meant to build the atmosphere of it being dark, cold, and alone. But there are ways to execute this and have it look good. Downpour only succeeds in making all of the visuals look faded and blurry. Regardless of how I adjust my TV, the game just looks like shit. It doesn't look grainy in a cool cinematic way, it looks like they programmed this game for the Gamecube or Wii and they upscaled it to play on next generation consoles. it just looks bad and underdeveloped, which is a real shame because the characters themselves have probably never looked more lifelike than they have in this installment of the game. All of the up close and clear images of Murphy look really good. To me its almost like they motion captured using Ashton Kutcher (which isn't a great marketing point, I'm just saying it looks impressive). But when you in the thick of action or any outdoor scene you have to watch it in blurry vision. I've been told that it looks better on the 360 version of the game, but that's not a valid excuse as far as I'm concerned. It is really annoying and should not be acceptable with the graphical abilities of today's consoles.

Murphy Pendelton. The character models are incredibly lifelike.
Maybe when he gets out of Silent Hill he can deal with the Butterfly effect.

The water effects are very cool. And when lightning cracks you immediately
start to panic because you know baddies are coming for you. 

One of the greatest and most notable strengths of Silent Hill franchise is the creepy and terrifying monsters you get to fight. More so than that, many of them went along with the theme of the games and the characters you play. In the first game Harry Mason is looking for his lost daughter, so you find yourself in the school fighting scary little skinless children in a demonic version of the school. In two, Jaaaaaames Sundtherland is followed by a sexier representation of his terminally ill wife so he would find himself in hospitals, fighting off twitchy deformed nurses and sets of legs joined at the waists as he's hunted by an executioner for ending the life of the one he loved. In the third installment, Heather Mason is forced to face her previous lives as Cheryl and Alessa and subsequently her role to become the rebirth of a god, so many of the monsters have very effeminate features or religious symbolism attached to them. They started to get away from this form of thematic  monster in the The Room and only really went back to it during the boss fights in Homecoming to represent the children sacrificed, but the monsters were all still kind of cool and still creepy looking. They were able to compliment the theme and tradition well. In Silent Hill: Downpour they really phoned it in and gave us some very lack luster "monsters", If you can even call them that. The enemies in this game that I have encountered so far are: A woman in rags with claws on her hands, A shirtless gimp in a ring gag with MMA fighting abilities, the same shirtless gimp guy only this time holding a knife, a giant skinless gorilla a giant mouth for a face, A blowup doll that sends transparent versions after me, a large man in a trench coat and gas mask, and a large glowing sphere that makes me disintegrate. Yeah ok, some of them are called prisoners and Murphy is a prisoner, but that's the only real connection and even that is lack luster. None of them are interesting or creepy, almost all of them humanoid. No originality to the monsters at all, so it just feels like I am fighting other people. This isn't Condemned, this is Silent Hill. Give me some cool deformed fucking monsters.

Lets just make a Human bigger and just put a big hole where his face is, that'll work
Really friggen phoning it in this time, Konami. you can do better than that. 

Yeah ok, they look weird, but their  just human. And that takes away from the ability to scare.

Another misconception that I had is that is that I thought we were going to go back to the fast paced frantic combat from Silent Hill: Homecoming, but in reality its actually a hybrid of the combat systems of Silent Hill 3, The Room, and Origins. The controls go back to that feeling of tank controls without actually using them so my grip on the combat feels kind of loose. The dodge roll from Homecoming is gone now and in its place is the block move from 3 and the charge up swing from The Room. With the controls being as clunky as the are, getting your lock on and timing your blocks always feels like a chore. They also brought back the weapon degradation from Origins but you can only hold one firearm and one melee weapon at a time. One one hand, this is super annoying because when you find a good weapon like a double edged axe you know its only going to be with you for a short period of time. However, it works really well where you in a in the thick of combat and you land a solid blow or block an attack and your trusty axe or pipe breaks in two, since you can't block attacks without a weapon in your hand, it leaves you with this moment of extreme tension where you are thinking "oh SHIT. I gotta get the hell out of here and find a weapon NOW." I usually hate weapons that break but in this case it really does work to make moments more tense and thankfully when you are near monsters you get an increase to your run speed so if you need to escape quickly you have the ability to do so. I can't think of how many times I've gotten stuck between two or 3 enemies only to have my axe break and the only weapon around is rock or a brick. My recommendation for the combat is this: Play the game for like an hour or two first. Then after you have a small handle on the controls, restart the game. You will breeze through the first area's again much more easily and you will be sitting on a pile of med-packs instead of trying to scrape by with one and hoping to last till you find the next one. They do a really nice gesture in the statistics screen where they give you the actual percentage of health you have instead of just a vague change of screen color or damage on your body so you always know where you are health wise. The combat is a bit loose but after a little while with it you'll get the patterns down and most of the enemies won't present you with much trouble.

The moment you start to think you have the combat down: you don't.

There is a severe lack of boss fights in this one too. I've been playing the game for well into double digit hours now I can only really think of one single fight that probably qualified as a "boss" per say, and even that was over so quickly that it didn't feel like much of a boss fight. That is kind of a disappointment because although Homecoming's fighting system wasn't perfect, it had a number of interesting looking bosses and different patterns to defeat them. I have no idea why boss fights are disappearing from gaming but its a damn fucking shame. Having tough, interesting bosses at the end of sections are incredibly satisfying and it gives you the opportunity to use all you have learned up to that point. I was sad to see them disappear in this one.

The game is glitchy as fuck as well. Right out the gate there are a fuck ton of frame rate issues that seem to come and go at random. Whenever you are trying to cam up or down you can almost always count the frame rate to glitch and find yourself starting up that the ceiling for no real reason at all. This hopefully is something that can be fixed with a patch and hopefully they do so soon.

I also mentioned in my prior review that I was not happy that Akira Yamaoka wasn't going to do the soundtrack and score of this game. If you haven't heard the music from the previous games, its so fucking good that I feel I need a change of pants afterwards. The music is just that good and sets the tone well. In this one, we are treated to the musical stylings of... ugh.. Korn.. To its credit, the game is not playing "freak on a leash" while I am fighting monsters. The tones are generally set well, but you are treated to a terrible song during the opening cinematic. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn is still there for two songs, but both of them are instrumentals, and to be honest I have become kinda attached to her a bit so I was unhappy to not get to hear her sing. I suppose it could be worse overall but now the team, artists, and now music of the original series is completely gone. Nobody who worked on the original Silent Hill's are here anymore. That should be a sign that this series should probably come to a close.

Through all these complaints I've made though, there were two big saving graces that turned a game I was very sour on to start into a game I couldn't wait to finish: Story and Atmosphere. The nature of Silent Hill both in game play and the town itself, hinge on the fact that you are completely alone. And it goes back to the feelings of the first two games, where you can spend hours wandering around the town from location to location trying to find the path you need or solve the number of side quests you find along the way. You might occasionally have a monster creeping on you but the city on the whole feels completely devoid of life, leaving this looming sense of dread that something bad is going to happen as you play through the game. Typically in the realm of Silent Hill, people who wander into the city are generally being haunted or punished for some atrocity they have previously committed and as you play through it you learn about what it is they did. In Downpour, you pretty much know what went wrong right out of the gate because it opens up with a murder, but as you play through you slowly learn what it is Murphy did that got him locked in prison and the truth about what really happened there. It starts off a little bit sluggish and yes, unlike previous games there doesn't seem to be much connection between the protagonist and the town of Silent Hill itself like other versions of the game, but the longer your press on the more engrossing it becomes. By like 3-5 hours in, every complaint I had about the controls or graphics were crushed by my need to see what happens next or figure out whats going on. It really has been one of the better stories in the Silent Hill mythos in recent years and it definitely is one of the first games in this series in a long time that set a generally scary atmosphere.

You will ALWAYS be looking over your shoulders. Enemies really sneak on you.

Definitely hit on atmosphere. Low light, eerie music, and that dread of being alone

Silent Hill: Downpour has been met with fairly average reviews from the major outlets. I suppose that is fair, the game is not doing anything to break the Silent Hill mold, and it definitely is not the 2nd coming of Silent Hill 2 like that has been promised over and over again. But they did take some steps in the right direction to try to bring back some of the feel to make the series feel scary again. I think with a few tweeks the game could have been much better than it is, but if you are a fan of the series as I am, I think you'll enjoy one more trip through Silent Hill.  Until they start bringing back in the people that made this franchise great, it will never bring back that charm that made is special again. The game is definitely worth a play through or two, but this franchise is probably on its last legs. I can't imagine another Silent Hill is on the horizon.

Course if there is I'm sure I'll be getting it cuz I'm a sucker. Just stop promising me Silent Hill 2.