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A Good Overall game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I never played the Original, so I can't say if this is a good sequal or not, but this game is very well done. My favorite scene, being the Hospitol... knocking off the cracked out zombie nurses with my shotgun one by one... It just doesn't get much better than that... the graphics are great, and you can remove that "noise" effect or whatever its called, instantly. I guess im new to the genre, for the movement gets a little jerky at times, especially fighting that pyramid head monster thing... but all in all, its a solid title... and the Story flows along very nicly, there were times I thought I was lost, and bam there was a cinematic that took me to more zombie mutilating goodness... There is a Side Quest included, although I haven't checked it out... its supposed to be an Xbox exclusive or something... just means more zombie killing for me I guess

The Best of the best.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 30, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I have been a fan of the first Silent Hill ever since it came out. As you could probably imagine that gave me very high expectations on the sequel. Well, I wasn't dissapointed. Silent Hill 2 is without a doubt on the top of my list. If you are a casual gamer that enjoys a good mind bending experience, this is the game for you.

Pretty Damn Creepy

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

ok, so i got this in the mail when i got home from christmas. i popped it right in the xbox to see what all the creepy-hype was about. right off the bat, it was obvious this game is older than splinter cell etc. you can't look all around and the movement is a little outdated. after sitting through a lot of "story" scenes i finally found the entrance to meeting up w/some scary stuff. it was creepy. the sound design is fantastic and the movement of the zombies is good and disturbing. i needed some help from the internet finding some of the clues and solving some of the riddles but it's pretty interesting. i imagine i'll be spending more time w/this game.

Potential, but failure to deliver.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: October 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First off, let me state that I am not a fanboy. Previous to Silent Hill 2, I have never played any survival/horror game. This leaves my review free of the Resident Evil bias and comparisons, allowing the game to be taken in its own right as opposed to how it faired against the competition and other releases in the Silent Hill franchise.
Silent Hill 2 is not a bad game. The graphics are okay once the visual white noise is turned off, while the CG cutscenes are truly brilliant. Plot is definitely there, serving as a large incentive to progress past the various puzzles; I found myself genuinely interested in James Sunderland's life and the mysterious happenings at Silent Hill. On normal difficulty the puzzles are somewhat lacklustre and do not require a great deal of cerebral processing, however I imagine on harder difficulty settings the puzzles may become truly bizarre. The ability to modify the puzzle's difficulty is a great nuance, allowing for the first time player to discover Silent Hill's layout before traipsing through it again with all the hindrances the riddles create. The voice-acting was very appropriate with each character's tone bang-on to how they were physically portrayed, although I did find it a little melodramatic and overdone at times. The music was excellent; Silent Hill 2 has one of the best in-game soundtracks I have ever heard, with each composition evoking the appropriate mood and adding greatly to the atmosphere. Sound-effects were mostly tolerable, excluding one scene where a character was throwing up, which sounded like a guttural "blurgh" repeated ad nausea.
No, despite the game lacking a little in some of the aforementioned areas, my main gripe with the game is this: IT'S NOT SCARY. Towards the beginning of the game James is provided with a broken pocket radio that blares out irritating static, increasing in intensity whenever a monster is near. Along with being one of the most annoying game devices I've ever seen (thankfully it can be turned off), it immediately eliminates any sort of "boo" scare the game could have provided, leaving the gamer only with the failed psychological drama told through the cutscenes, which will leave them failing to wet their pants in terror. The monsters are dull dull dull, all utilising the same off-brown type texture, and all three types (variety +++) failed to fill me with any terror due to their blatantly stupid design, bland monochromatic textures and slow walking speed, resulting in my swift popping of a cap into their poorly conceived ass before they even had a chance to get near me. If they actually had a scary face or anything like that I never got to see it; out in the open they always die face-down, always, there is only one death animation; and in close-quarters corridor style fighting the strange camera angles Konami has opted to go for often allowed me to see no more than a foot. The camera is very odd in this game. It cannot be controlled with the right thumb-stick like in any other third-person game I've played, but has preset, unalterable angles. I suppose this is meant to make the game more scary due to the fact that you often can't even see a monster when it's directly in front of you, but comes off more as annoying, making you re-learn outdated controls from previous generation console games, that you never thought you'd have to use again. The worst part is that the main figure-head or boss of the game is just a regular monster with a large pyramid for a head. This is pure laziness on the design department's behalf. If someone puts a cereal packet over their face they don't suddenly become a pseudonym for terror, they look like a stupid git. The spine-chilling scares just aren't coming.
The only remaining avenues for terror both fail. In the course of James's quest he runs around collecting titbits of written information, sometimes essential to solving a riddle, most often fantastically useless. This useless information is intended to chill the player and make them wonder what demonic happenings took place in Silent Hill but it cuts out half the information only s__ceed_ng in p_is__n_ t_e _lay_r off.
There is some nice cinematography in the cutscenes, where rapid angle changes are meant to invoke a feeling of insanity. While well executed, they fail at their intended purpose. After sitting through so many well-done cutscenes I was very disappointed with the ending. I simply got scrolling text and a voice reading it out. This is not 1980 and the Xbox has a little more processing power than a Commodore 64. I realise that there are 6 different ending and maybe I simply got the worst anti-climax in gaming history, regardless, I'm disappointed.
The game has so much potential to be scary. The excellent locations and marvellous lighting effects could inspire terror if used correctly. A run-down mental hospital; an abandoned underground prison: these are the kinds of places that chilling artefacts of insanity could be found and terrifying enemies fought, but we get the same old monochrome monsters with the same, lumbering moves and the same "1993: Big Bad Billy was found m__der__g his daughter..." newspaper articles with some silly pictures thrown in for good measure.
It takes something special, some unknown factor to make a successful psychological horror and it appears that game developers haven't quite figured out what it is yet.
This game was not a chore to play. I definitely got enjoyment out of it. The combat was repetitive, the game had a drab colour-scheme and there was no fear to be had, but the beautiful cutscenes, captivating story and interesting puzzles made up for it. Think of this game, not as an exercise in terror, but as a well-written interactive story and you will enjoy it far more.

walk around forever

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 12
Date: March 29, 2002
Author: Amazon User

As mentioned by others, the spooky fog is really nice. The begining story ( wife's letter, go through spooky graveyard, meet the first monster in the town ) is intersting. But, after getting into the apartment building ( it's not easy to figure out too ), the game becomes really boring. I get in and out of different rooms trying to find those tiny coins and keys in order to progress to next step. ( some doors are locked and I need to search other rooms to get the tiny key --- this trick repeated many times) After I get in and out of different rooms for hundreds times, eventually I can leave this building .....relax? Nooo, I just get into the next apartment building, and I need to do this in-out-in-out job again! The only way to stop is to eject the disc and retun it to store.

Fortunately, I RENTed it.

Excellent graphics . . . mediocre controls

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: January 16, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This games is visually stunning. Like the game play pre se the only complaint I have is the controls. There are two sets of joysticks yet only one can be used for directional control. Unlike Halo where the left controller is used for forward, backward and side to side montion and the right for direction the designers incorporated all directional control into the left one. This makes manuerving the character very clunky. Otherwise, if you liked Resident Evil you will like this game.

Scary, but not good

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 9
Date: October 12, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Initially I read a review by an XBox magazine, stating it had 15-16 hours of gameplay. I've done it on normal and beat it in a few minutes over 9. The only difficult thing about it is the camera. It's VERY bad. I played "The Thing" before, and in online reviews on Amazon, general complaints about that game was that you can't look up or down when you're in 3rd person mode. Well, at least there you can shift into 1st person mode, albeit not move.

In Silent Hill 2, you're stuck in the strangest 3rd person view. Sometimes you see yourself from the front, sometimes from the back. Sometimes you can adjust the camera to show you from the back or front, but it requires that you've walked far enough into the space ahead. When does this get annoying? Well, when the guy is place at the upper edge of the screen and you can't change the camera angle, heading right into a dead thing that starts whipping your hiney. The only warning you do have is the radio. If your radio-equipment (which emits static when dead things are near) starts buzzing and you know a deadhead is near, you can hit the action-button and see the guy fire away. Whether you hit or not, is a separate issue. The "aim"-button seems to malfunction at times. It's quite important to hit, as well. You see, there's a "feature" in the game where you can put 4 shots into a dead guy and he gets up ... put 4 more in him and he might die. That is, if you don't run up to him before he gets up and stomp on him. Yep, they don't die until you stomp on them. It's not necessarily a brutal boot either. You can stomp their leg and they die. That makes no sense to me. But maybe he's got some new superboot.

Few more things before I tie this up. Visibility is generally low in this game. I think this is for compensating fairly poor graphics. It's either foggy, as in the beginning. You get a taste of daylight towards the end. Because it's dark so much, I'd opt to say that the graphics in the game are neither good nor bad. Outta a five stars, I'd give graphics a weak 3-star. It might well be that the camera does not do it justice, though. Which brings me onto the topic of zero-visibility ...

Zero-visibility is a reoccuring theme. You have it in the beginning with the fog, and, more importantly, you have it throughout the whole game with the camera-angles. The camera gets no stars. It's just plain pitiful.

Scare-factor is good. The sounds make the game quite frightening. The storyline is decent and a lot of thought has been put into the little artifacts that you find throughout the game. The game, however, can go without any action for rather long time-spans (becuase you killed all hostile things). But that won't keep you calm. All the time, you wonder if a zombie is near, simply because you can't see due to the camera. The sounds get a strong 3 stars. Storyline gets a 3. It's a good base for a story, but contains no real surprises.

Gameplay ... as far as I'm concerned, the gameplay can be summarized as: go from point A to point B and don't let the camera angle get you killed. In fact, in open spaces you don't need to kill anyone if you don't feel like it. Save up the ammo for the bosses. It gets 1 star.

About the 9 hours I put into the game, all but 1 feels like a waste of time. And it was the first hour of anticipation, when all the sounds were new and scary. The game unfortunately does not get more intense than that, and it gets boring to run around large areas, trying to get from A to B, or find X and Y to do Z.

Gameplay is horrible - story line is good.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 10
Date: July 06, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The gameplay is terrible... anyone claiming this game is worthy of 5 stars needs to go see a head doctor. I played this game for about 8 hours and still there were times when a zombie approached me but I couldnt attack it - instead I would hit the wall with my weapon. Not even worth playing.

Great game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: January 21, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I bought Silent Hill 2 not knowing what to expect....it turned out to be one of the spookiest games i've ever played. I agree with other reviewers that the game starts out a little slow, but it really picks up. Do yourself a favor...to REALLY take full advantage of the games story, play it alone, at night and in the dark. The fog all over the town and freaky places you visit ( a dark, deserted apartment building, an even darker hospital to name a few) plus the crisp graphics, chilling music, distant screams and the footsteps you occasionally hear of someone who is'nt there, will have you looking over your shoulder in your own living room.

The only thing keeping Silent Hill2 from being a 5 star game to me is the replay value. Although it provides hours and hours of gameplay, after beating the game on different difficulty levels....not much changes. A few different weapons, a few new items to aquire, more difficult riddles to the same puzzles and different endings depending on level of play.....but the fright level dwindled going into my third complete game. I suggest renting before you buy and go from there. Other than that, Silent Hill2 is a solid game.

SCARY-ASS GAME...Not for the yungins

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: February 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I first heard about Silent Hill on the school bus when a kid said "dude, have you played Silent Hill 2? It's scary!". Confusing it with another game, I told him it's not. Fast forward to 2 years later when my freind brought it over to my house. He said "Pop it in and s*** your pants". I started to play and thought I wasn't freaked out until I walked up to an abandoned car and a zombie-like monster crawls out from below. Just my first taste at what is the horrifying... horror of SILENT HILL 2. This game has it all! Scary plot, freaky levels, difficult puzzles, amazing graphics, great charater development, and best of all, awsome weapons with which I shoot ZOMBIES!!! It may sound like a RESIDENT EVIL rip off, but compared to this, RESIDENT EVIL is like SESAME STREET. Let's all buy SILENT HILL 2 and not play it in the dark!

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