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Fun Exploration, Weak Combat

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: August 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill 2- Restless Dreams
Restless Dreams is almost the exact same game as the Playstation version of the game. The only difference is there is an added scenario you can play through. The storytelling is very dark and disturbing. The graphics shift from dark and weird, to demonic and disgusting. The sound in the game is amazing. The problem with the game lies in the repetitive gameplay. I love this game, but I will admit that it has an extreme flaw.

Graphics- 9.5/10
The graphics don't exactly look realistic, but they are done in a cinematic way that will leave you breathless. The cut scenes are often short, but run seamlessly into the normal gameplay graphics. The picture often has a fuzzy, dark look to it that reminds me of an old horror movie. The cut scenes are done amazingly and you will find yourself immersed in the world they have created.

Environments are designed well, and will even change as you go through the gameplay. One time you might be walking through a spooky hallway, but after a major point in the story that same hallway has blood all over it. There is a considerable amount of fog in the game, but it is not to hide graphical failures. You know this because later in the game the fog is gone and replaced by darkness.

The dark in this game is creatively done too. If it is too dark, your character won't be able to investigate items or his map. You get a flashlight early in the game, but there are points where you will just not be able to use it and will have to figure out what to do. At the same time though, your flashlight alerts enemies of your presence.

The enemies in the game, despite not having many of them, look great. Some stand like mannequins and only move when you get close enough. Others with stumble around until you take them down, then they will crawl across the floor. There are only about 6-7 different enemy types in the game though.

Story- 9/10
You are James Saunderland. You have been a broken man since the tragic death of your wife, Mary, three years ago. One day you receive a letter from your thought dead wife. She asks him to meet her in Silent Hill at their "special place." James is unsure of what is going on, but he has to check it out.

Along your trek through Silent Hill, you will meet many troubled people. Speaking to them will bring chills down your spine. Important characters you meet will be Laura, an 8-year old girl, and Maria, a striking Mary look-alike. These characters all evolve over the course of the story.

The story is excellent. It does have a few problems though. One, the story is very complex and you really have to think about it if you want to understand it. You might even have to talk to a few other players to even understand it. The story is left open like that. Another problem is that the monsters that you face off with throughout the game seem to be an after thought. They are not truly explained until the very end of the game. I felt that it was too late by then.

Sound- 9.5/10
The sound in this game is almost perfect. Early in the game you get a radio. The radio only plays static, and only when an enemy is close. This is a good way to create suspense. Sometimes the radio will actually play words they you should pay attention to.

The voice acting is mostly good. I felt that James felt too calm, but everyone else I liked. The monsters all sound disturbing. Gun and melee weapon noises are decent. Sometimes the addition of random disturbing sounds really creates a great atmosphere in this game. Great sound overall.

Gameplay- 7/10
You start on the outskirts of Silent Hill. All you have is a map, the letter, and a photo of Mary. You make your way into town to try to figure out if Mary is there. You discover a town full of monsters and closed to the public in almost everyway. Mary keeps sending you clues, and you follow them like a dog...because usually every other way is closed off. The game is like a mystery adventure game with some monsters along the way.

This game plays out very similar to Resident Evil. I have always liked Resident Evil, so I thought this would be a good thing. It is not though. The monsters in this game are lacking, and never really pose much of a threat. They are disturbing, but you can just walk right past them. In Resident Evil, a zombie or a hunter always had a chance to injure you. In this game there is almost not chance you will get hurt by the monsters. When they do hit you, it lacks the suspense. The monsters are just not a big enough deal for you to care about them.

The rest of the gameplay has you following Mary's clues. They lead you to Apartments, Museums, and Hospitals. The concept involves you entering a building and trying every door until you find one that works. Most of the doors are broken and you'll never get in them. Every single building, it is the same thing. Once you find a key or something, you go back and unlock a door. However, this never gets tedious. I enjoyed exploring the various building and find out the secrets of Silent Hill.

This game implements melee and gun combat. Both are horribly done. All melee weapons in this game are imprecise and often get you hurt before you can hit an enemy. The auto-aim feature in this game is horrible. You often think you have aimed, but instead you will hit the wall or something. There are very few weapons even in this game to start with, and none of them excite you to wield them.

Difficulty- 6/10 (Note- This is how much I like the difficulty)
Difficulty is very well done in this game. You can adjust puzzle difficulty and monster difficulty separately. This allows for you to adjust the two key features of this game for your playing style. This is very innovative in a video game, as games usually just have a couple difficulty settings that change everything. This game allows you to customize different aspects of the gameplay.

Why did I give this category such a low score then? No matter what difficulty you put this game on the monsters will be too easy. They serve almost no purpose, so it's not fun killing them. Also, the exploration in the game is based on luck. You stumble onto things that help you. In the beginning, you aren't even told where to go. You just have to search the huge town until you find something. There are not a lot of suggestions as to where you need to go.

Overall- 7.5/10
I like this game a lot. I really do. I just can't give it that great of a score considering the weak gameplay and luck-based exploration. Sound, graphics, and the story are great, but not enough to pull this one up more. I still suggest buying this one if you are looking to enter a very disturbing world, but don't expect the best gameplay.

A Silent Hill veteran gives the sequel a solid 5 stars

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The "Silent Hill" series is hard for me to refer to as 'video games'...they are, quite literally, a state of mind. Die-hard fanatics of other 'Survival Horror' games may find the series disappointing and, above-all, confusing. To thoroughly enjoy these games you must let go any precepts you have about a literal norm that 'everything in the world has an explanation'. In the world of Silent Hill, this is far from the truth...and that's what makes it scary.

Like it's predecessor, Silent Hill 2 puts you into a world of horror and psychological terror as you venture through the infamous town limits of Silent Hill -- further immersed by XBOX's graphical and sound capabilities. After playing for ten minutes, Silent Hill familiars will say to themselves "it's starting again...", and non-familiar will be screaming "what the heck???".

A few big pluses for this one over the first one was the more frequent human encounters. While some say it breaks the fear of being alone in a frightening world, the arcane and strange nature of your encounters at times will send chills down your spine. Another big plus, the Voice Talent -- absolutely wonderful. Capcom can take a few lessons from Konami's ability to cast voices with believable emotions!

This 'game' is more poignant than the last, riding on a riveting plotline with scenes and cinemas that will leave you breathless and/or misty-eyed.

Good luck...and say 'hi' to Maria for me ^^

Amazing

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 13
Date: December 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Beautiful game. The sounds are realistic, the graphics are sweet, the story is nice, great creatures and easy to handle controls. What Resident Evil should have been. If you like survival horrors, this is the best one yet...

Nice job making this thing "Creepy"

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Don't play this thing at home in the dark while you are alone. This thing is creepy! The characters, the surroundings, the SOUNDS!!! I dare you to play this thing with your surround sound on at night and not get creeped out. While these first person games are not my thing, my wife has fallen in love with it. It is the only game she even cares to play, and by play I mean, I have to sit next to her to keep her safe from the scary stuff.. It is a little slow and you do a lot of running around aimlessly...However, like the guide says, James, the main character is not a super hero. He is clumsy and is just an average guy with average skills. He doesn't shoot straight, he misses and falls a lot too. But for the creepiness and realism factor, it is addictive.

Decent Resident Evil-style game for XBOX

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: October 10, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Picture Resident Evil without the static backgrounds, better graphics and a truly terrifying atmosphere and you have Silent Hill 2 for the XBOX.

The one thing this game does very well is its ability to create a tense, terrifying and suspenseful mood. You never quite know what's around that corner or what's waiting for you at the end of a dark hallway. Believe me, the shock moments are well executed in this game and will startle you on more than one occassion. Walk by an abandoned car and suddenly a shrieking zombie comes skittering out from underneath it. The sense of dread and fear you get when you run down the end of a dark hallway hoping to find an exit door only to see a zombie standing in the darkness slowly fading into view as your flashlight illuminates the area in front of you is enough to make anyone tense up with genuine fear. Moments like these are what make the game so great...on it's own, SH2 is just a simple 3D puzzle/exploration/find-the-item game...but because you're always in a tense state as you perform trivial tasks like searching a room, etc., not knowing what will jump out at you, the game's rating instantly goes up to a 4 out of 5.

The game is relatively hard the first time around as some of the puzzles are ridiculously obscure. But the difficulty CAN be adjusted separately for the puzzles and main game itself. But you owe it to yourself to play the game on NORMAL or HARD first. As an added bonus, there's an extra scenario only for the XBOX, so we XBOX owners truly benefit! Interesting game, and one that will hold you over until HALO 2 and Shenmue II come out!

Great game .. not the Best

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: December 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill is one of the most eeriest game you will ever play. My only tip is play it with somebody and have the lights on. (...) Konami gave the XboX owners some extras with the game: an Xbox-exclusive extra episode in which you play as Mary the wife of the main character. Even with the extra episode it may not be reason enough to buy it for XboX if you have played it in PS2, but it will extend your playing time for about 6-10 hours.

You play as James Sunderland, a man who comes to Silent Hill after he receives a mysterious letter from his dead wife(Mary), asking him to meet her there. When you finally get there you notice that there is something very wrong, it is up to you to find out. As usual you will be spending most of the time solving puzzles but along the way killing tons of zombie-type creatures, which RARELY is a challenge (note:Enemy AI is (...)). One thing I like about the game is the mapping system, it will help you alot since you will know what areas you have missed along the way if you get stuck.

The graphics and sound of the game is definitely been refined for the XboX version. The creatures in Silent Hill 2 sound as scary as they look, but their AI is something to be worked on. All in all a great game and worth the fifty bucks you will be buying it for, if not rent it. For parents out there this game is not for kids, even a 21-year old gamer like me gets nightmares from this game.

Not your average survival horror....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: February 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Let me start off by saying this game is amazing. Its similiar to other survival horrors, like resident evil, but this ones better. First off, you can customize how you like to play it. What i mean by this, is first you choose how hard to want the combat diffuculty, beginner, easy, normal, hard, if you choose beginner mostly everyone dies in 1 hit. Now you might think thats stupid, but its actually smart, because after you choose that you get to choose your PUZZLE diffuculty, so you could make the enemies REALLY easy but have REALLY hard puzzles, so its more of a scary puzzle game, or you can crank up the monsters and lower the puzzle to get an action fighter game. Or you can customize it any way you like it to fit how you like to play your games. I think this is extremely innovative. And the story is OUTSTANDING, it makes you think, not to mention MANY different endings, and these endings fit how you played the game, your style of play, rather than what you accomplished. The slighest things, like staying at low health most of the time will affect your ending. Which means you can play over and over and never get tired of it while your earning all the sweet endings. And another thing, you can use the same controls as resident evil, where forward goes the direction your facing, and left and right turn, or you can change it so up is up down is down left is left and right is right. I like that control setting alot more, and it beats resident evil in that category also. Graphics, the graphics are SUPERB, at times, it looks nearly real life, that includes some parts IN GAME. Konami did an excellent job in creating every detail to fit each atmosphere. Overall, this is an awesome, although i beat the PS2 verson, i had to BUY the x-box version cause it has a sub-game and an all new ending. This is a truly amazing game. If you liked Resident Evil at all, this game is definately for you.

Best horror game ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: June 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I hate when someone buys a game that has horror on it and gives it a bad review because they said it doesnt have enough action it not supposed to its a horror game you are trying to solve a mystery and get away from the monsters at the same time not free the whole town from monsters. Its a great game i loved the first silent hill and i love this one.

The scariest game you will ever lay eyes on.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Oh my God.Oh my God. This is tooooo scary. The sounds make you close your ears and run out of the room. Very frightning. The puzzles are very challenging(get the guide,trust me.)The monsters,on the other hand, ar not. Very easy. The bosses? yawn. Despite the easy monsters, this game is great.Please dont let this game anywhere near anyone under the age of 9 or 10. Very gory(many murders and blood.) Too scary fr a younger audience.I am 12 myself and I am scared of it. But for the more mature people, definatly check this one out.

Hauntingly detailed, mentally unsettling, but just a bit too short...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: September 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

My initial fears that this was just an overhyped Resident Evil clone were quickly put to rest - although the two games share a genre and pieces of a control scheme, their personalities couldn't be further apart. Where the first three Resident Evils focused on the cheesier, blood-n-guts style with a hint of puzzle solving in the name of variety, Silent Hill 2 concentrates much more on the unknown, the unexplained and the psychologically disturbing. Where Resident Evil 2 is horror in the vein of Dawn of the Dead, Silent Hill 2 is more along the lines of The Ring or The Shining.

It's that establishment of potential horror, not the actual moments of battle where the monster lies revealed, that are most successful in Silent Hill and, honestly, in most of the better films within the genre. To say that this game is lacking in real scary moments would be both unfair and untrue... I jumped more times than I'm comfortable to admit while playing through this one in the dark... but it properly uses such moments as an accent, rather than a crutch. It's been said that the most horrific monster in the world can never be captured on film, because it resides within the collective imaginations of the audience. Hollywood can never frighten you as badly as you can frighten yourself. It's this kind of mentality that I see reflected in Silent Hill 2 from the very get-go. Sure, they do eventually show you the monsters, and they're significantly horrific on their own, but they're all little more than pawns in this scheme, even the bosses. They're just around to nudge your mind in the right direction, so that the little shadows you'll catch darting around at the edge of your field of vision can be more effective and more relative to the story.

In terms of atmosphere, there's very little that this game does wrong. It's learned all the right lessons from the progression and evolution of cinematic horror and applied them to the incomparably personal experience of a quality video game. It's established a unique style, a great cluster of settings, and a wonderful premise (the lead character, James, receives a letter from his wife three years after her death, pleading with him to visit the town of Silent Hill) but the actual follow-through of the story and the accompanying character interactions are lacking. This reminds me of Eternal Darkness in a way, in that a lot of the strange occurrences and developments seem completely random and are never connected to the story itself. Almost universally, the cast is detached from reality, lacking in personality and in emotion, which works within the confines of the plot but results in the player never being fully drawn into the game's world.

I came away from this game feeling as though I'd read a short story that had been padded out and enlongated thanks to the inclusion of a dozen different unrelated asides. It's a fifty page story stretched over the course of a three hundred page novel. You'll meet five non-playable centric characters around the city, but only two of them have a real bearing on the plot, which is itself little more than a series of vague insinuations. It's a real shame, too, because all of the pieces have been set in the right place to accommodate for a much more striking, intriguing tale.

Controlling James as he explores the city is fairly easy, if not entirely ideal. Several elements of the Resident Evil control scheme have surfaced with Silent Hill 2's configuration, most notably the "boat steering" movement controls. If you didn't like standing in one place, pivoting and then running directly forward or backward in Capcom's zombie-fest, you aren't going to like it here. Personally, I've grown used to it and the steering doesn't seem to get in my way any more, but I can certainly see why some players would have developed a bitter hatred for it. One thing that differs from Resident Evil's traditional setup, however, is a fully polygonal environment and a free-roaming camera. What that means is less cheap scares and monsters hiding in plain sight, and a much more interactive experience.

I'll come right out and admit to savoring every last bit of the visual direction and graphical representations of Silent Hill 2. If there's one area that this game absolutely nails, it's this: everything from the character designs to the environments to the simple, yet undeniably successful, film grain texture that overlays every moment of gameplay... it's all an unbridled success. This is among the most thought-out, fully realized visual productions I've ever seen in a game, and even the hardware limitations of the original Xbox are addressed in a concise, effective manner that works within the confines of the big picture. The dreamlike state of your visit to the town explains away the boundaries around the playable area... you don't run into an invisible wall, there are just mysterious tarps or bottomless pits sealing off certain parts of town. You'll accept it at face value because, hey, you just fired three rounds into a set of animated mannequin legs.

Another noteworthy visual innovation is the complete lack of any kind of heads-up display or on-screen indicator. With the multitude of potential actions and inventory items that seem to have completely overtaken the industry, it's a nice change of pace to see a game with just a character and an environment on the screen at any given time. It not only keeps the playing field open for some of the more subtle effects, but also makes the experience even more akin to that of watching a movie.

The appearance of the monsters remains among the most successfully frightening I've ever seen. It's easy to throw sharp teeth, bumpy skin and red eyes onto something, call it an enemy and commence with the cheap scares. What's not so easy is introducing a baddie that's horrifying if just because you have no idea what in the living hell it really is. The bad guys of SH2 are, obviously, the latter. They don't always look so much like they're attacking you out of anger, so much as they're lashing out because they're constantly in pain and see anything that moves as a possible cause. I almost felt pity for these things, their existence is so pitiful, so filled with tragedy.

I can't rightfully discuss the visuals of this game without giving some love to the incredible lighting effects, either. I'd truthfully rank this game ahead of the original Splinter Cell in that category, and Sam Fisher's first romp was released almost specifically to show off everything the Xbox could do in that respect. In Silent Hill 2, you travel the entire city with just a flashlight, which (needless to say) is handled magnificently. Everywhere you go, that single light source is playing with your surroundings to cast all sorts of bizarre, frightening, downright malicious shadows throughout the room

I adored the majority of my experience with Silent Hill 2. The story, while thin at times, is generally workable and never really insultingly self-indulgent. The length of the game bothered me a bit, as the main game map is quite elaborate and seemed to have a lot of unrealized potential, but that goes back to the weakness of the basic plot and the lack of any major side stories of consequence. If you've got a weekend to kill and want to be emotionally shaken, this is exactly the game for you. It features one of the best all-around identities in the history of the industry, takes dozens of hints from the lessons learned by its predecessors in film, and is truly horrifying on several levels. If the story had been a little thicker and the cast had been fleshed out a little further, this would've been close to perfect.

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