S&S; Review: Silent Hill Downpour

Title: Silent Hill Downpour
Format: PS3, Xbox 360
Release Date: March 13, 2012
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Vatra
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M

Bonjourno, feel the wrath of my silent hill review! New Silent Hill game, I know what you’re thinking, “Shit right?” well no, it’s actually pretty good, I know right! Satan must have ice skated into work this morning. It’s no silent hill 2 but what is? Not even silent hill 2 is silent hill 2 anymore but it feels like I haven’t played a decent survival horror game since Dead Space one (Dead space 2 sucked, giving Isaac a personality = epic fail), so I was really looking forward to this but after the slew of silent hill abortions I was wary of this but first ten minutes into the game and there was no mention of crazy nightmare world cults so things are looking up.
You play Murphy Pendleton. I don’t care what you think I like him, So what if he has two last names, who needs a first name anyway? Who cares that you could swap his first name and his last name and it would still be acceptable because I don’t!  Sporting this hang dog expression he seems really redeemable but has obviously gang-raped someone. Which is apparent after you play through the tutorial which is old Murph giving some fat guy a good the classic prison shanking in the shower, needless to say he drops the soap. I love when games do this kind of thing because in my opinion the tutorial of a game is really important because it’s your first step into the game world, and as we all know first impressions are everything. They affect how absorbed you are into a game world, a good tutorial should be seen and not heard, it should ease you into the suspension of disbelief. If a game has a ridiculous character spouting “Press A to jump” you become aware that you’re playing a game, a game should try and make you forget your playing a game so that it can create an emotional response from the player, you have to forget the characters are fictional so you can establish a connection with them and ultimately care what happens to them.
The combat is pretty standard silent hill but they’ve incorporated blocking, which is kind of ridiculous because the monsters block, so it’s like you’re playing slaps with these freaks. I don’t know why they try to improve silent hill combat it’s supposed to suck. It’s scarier when you play someone vulnerable like an office worker who fights like a paraplegic trying to fuck a door knob. It’s one of my main gripes with Homecoming because shepherd can fight giant monsters with arses for faces with a knife and win.
Le music cest chic’, it’s done by Daniel Licht which I’m pretty sure is the guy that does the music  for Dexter, there can’t be that many Daniel Lichts knocking about could there? Anyway the music is really good, the main theme was done by Korn which is nice, bit showy but nice. It samples a few songs from silent hill 2, and there are these nice bits where you find radios playing hauntingly relevant mood music. They come complete with an annoying dj, he does a nice job of making you feel like everything is fine and you’re just crazy but then whispers to you frantically, destroying that small sliver of normality.
First thing I have to say is it looks stunning, the fog and the lighting and the rain look and sound fantastic, a lot of effort has been put into this game to put emphasis on scenery and atmosphere, which is probably why the monsters suck so much. Yeah the monsters are a little phoned in, there are only like a few different types and they’re basically just dudes with messed up faces. They don’t really represent anything, well they’re supposed to be prison inmates but the guy was in prison, it’s sort of saying he’s still in prison. 
In silent hill 2 (I’m gonna do this a lot because it was the best one! and probably one of the best survival horror games ever) the monsters are just the product of a depraved mind, everything from the way they look and move to the way they sound just isn’t right and it really gets under your skin but I think downpour fumbled the ball on this one. Although I do think it’s a step in the right direction because ever since 2 the focus has mainly been on creating ever more fucked up monsters with like knees for eyes and a fist for a penis and penises for fists and to hell with pacing and ambience because that’s where this game shines, it is pretty scary. Needless to say that is the bottom line. Homecoming had really messed up cross-dressing with bananas for heads monsters but it wasn’t scary, it was just an action movie without the silicone. Downpour’s monsters are a bit lame but it chooses its moments wisely creating this ghost train type of creepiness with the occasional bone shaking jump scares and bus stop moments galore.
The weapon system ops for the origins disposable style which is cool makes combat a bit more frantic as you scramble around for another weapon and gives you a lot of variety, from broken bottles to wrenches and axes. I also like the fact you can use mans oldest weapon; the rock.
The otherworld is very different never been a massive fan of the bingo bango instant nightmare world before your eyes thing from the movie then ripped off by homecoming. It’s supposed to be jarring but I think it was more disorientating when there was a transition like in 2, you fall unconscious then you wake up somewhere slightly more horrible, makes it more confusing and strange like a dream turning into a nightmare. In downpour it just changes in a flash, it is pretty cool because the camera goes all fish eye and everything gets a bit Alice in wonderland slash meets prison break on your ass, which is a refreshing change from the typical industrial theme with skin for wallpaper.
The camera also likes to do a bit of a resident evil on you as if saying; “I control what you see”. Not really scary as much as it is trippy, the vortex thing that chases you in the otherworld really isn’t doing anything for me, because it doesn’t really do anything and I don’t get what it represents but I love the shifting environments. I just don’t think there was as much effort put into the nightmare world as in the other games. I love how supremely weird it is, it’s more like a haunted house, like an amusement park ride, odd rather than terrifying, bizarre. The architecture is also really well thought out the use of high and low ceilings to change perspective is really nice.
Why is Silent Hill so obsessed with toilets?! In every game you can interact with the toilets so of course I inspect every one of them in case there’s something inside like 2 but there isn’t so why make them flushable?
I miss the old saving system; it’s just an auto save system, nostalgia fail. The rain isn’t triggered, it just happens. Everything changes when it rains, not as in nightmare world just in general, you can see less and there are more monsters so this game has three stages. Oh almost forgot to mention, free roaming! Yeah there was sort of an exploration aspect in the other games but I never really wanted to, it would be like sifting through broken glass only to find a soiled needle then to carry on looking. You didn’t want to look because what you’d see behind the curtain would be more horror, but in downpour pulling back the curtain reveals the humanity hiding in silent hill... as well as more horror, obviously.
I really like this game because it’s so fresh, it’s like they threw the rule book out the window, for instance if you play homecoming and 3 you can see that it follows a specific framework, they both work the same way as 2, they’re trying to do the same thing but a little different. That’s kind of how the game industry works, they make one great game then spend the rest of their lives trying to recreate it, because it’s a business and it makes more business sense to squeeze more money from a success than gamble on something new (Fuck you Sonic, die already!). 
This just sort of goes its own way, it shakes things up a little. Its unpredictable there are no ridiculous boss fights, enemies randomly popping up. it seems a lot more grown up. I sort of cashed in my chips when shattered memories came out, it made me lose faith, it was so gimmicky and pathetic, I didn’t think they could recover. I’m not saying this game is perfect but it restores my faith a little, it gives me hope for the future of silent hill and the future of survival horror because this is without a doubt the best survival horror game in years (not a hard title to grasp when the only other contestant is Amy but hey it’s something).  
Can’t really say much about the endings, I’m a little disappointed in how the game industry goes about displaying morality as just a series of binary choices, simplifying the human condition to press B to live or X to die. Morality systems I think are one of the most useless gimmicks of all time, simply there to add replayability but are always a choice between being Hitler or Gandhi, why won’t it just let me be me? Gandler! When do we in real life ever come across decisions like that, where are there are only two options, good or bad? The answer is never, and having those choices in games destroys any chance of being really engaged. The characters stop being complex and interesting and just become dogs who you’re making dance by moving their legs about. Rant concluded.
When it comes down to it if you’re a fan of survival horror you have no choice but to buy it because what else is there? You’ll just be sitting on your hands waiting to be disappointed by resident evil 6 otherwise, don’t get me wrong I pre-ordered it but it seems to have forgotten it’s a survival horror game and now thinks its die hard 5.
Aurevoir!