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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.

WAY TOO HARD AND CLUNKY 6 OUT OF 10

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill 2 : Restless Dreams succeeds at giving off the series trademark creepy vibe and filling you full of despair while scaring the s*** out of you. Unfortunately, issues mar this game from reaching its true potential. First off the game is way too hard for people who are not familiar with this series. Your objectives are not explained well which will leave you confused and wondering where you're supposed to go and what to find. You'll find yourself constantly looking at your map to locate streets and specific locations which will slow you down. Second, is the controls. The combat in this game is extremely clunky and unreliable and I found myself asking; "Why do I have to press two buttons to attack an enemy? And why is his reponse time slow? Why does my camera change views for me?" I liked the really creepy vibe in this game but it's so hard to control and solve clues. I am hoping since a new developer is working on Silent Hill 5 that it will function properly and be easier to work with. But this game is for Silent Hill fans only.

x-box version has more!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is different from the playstation2 version! It has an extra side mission where you can play as Maria. The only way to get this on the ps2 is to get the "greatest hits" version.
This game has 4 standard endings, and two strange out-there endings so replay value is relatively high.
Keep in mind the game was made years ago, so the scares aren't as extreme as Fatal Frame for example, but it gets better towards the end.

Action Thriller Chiller

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: December 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game chilled me to the bone all the way until the end. I literally had to have my roomate stay in the living room and watch me play the game, because I was afraid to play alone. This game so far is the scariest game I've ever played!

Now for the downsides: Camera angles are choppy, boss fights (or any fight) is clumsy, and the storyline is cryptic (much like most Japanese storylines)

But overall: Worth the play.

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.

Pathetic attempt at a video game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 14
Date: September 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

After 30 minutes of game play my character walked about 100 miles through thick fog and junk graphics. I came to 6 dead-ends, and killed like 5 guys (which is really hard when the player control totally sucks). I've played this type of game before and usually they are ok. But if this game moved any slower it would be on pause. If you are looking for a game with a creepy feel, then this is it. But if you are looking for a game to entertain you...pick something else. I was bored to death playing this.

WOW !! What a Game !!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Now This is my Genera !!
This game offers Everything In aspect Of a Horror Genera Type of game should be !!!
I love this game played it for years and With a Total of 6 thats right 6 Different Endings The Last One Espically For the X Box ONLY I would Recommend this game and Then some !!
If anyone is looking for a scare or think they can survive in Silent Hill , Welcome, This game is for you !!
The Monsters And Graphics Have been Hyped Up of Course for the X box only !!
New weapons , New Items, New monsters, New Fear !!
You meet plenty of New Characters In this game.... And one That might Seem a little too Familiar To your Main Character....

Hope this Insight Helps you Good Gamers Out there !

I would recommend This Game to anyone who thinks they can survive in any kind of horror game, Remind you this IS NOT Resident Evil, you do not get some kind of Automatic Assult rifle and just maul down Mindless Zombies , Not anything Against resident Evil I love them as well but this is a little bit more of a survival Type of game.

>:D

The most solid example of SH: Same mood and imagery, but greatest, most coherent story.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: September 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

THE SHORT: Less gory and satanic than the first game, but with a great story- the most coherent and understandable in the series, and with a fantastic twist at the end. 5 possible endings, great atmosphere. Sometimes frustrating (but adjustable) puzzle difficulty but fairly easy fighting.

THE LONG: The original game was great- similar to Resident Evil but unique enough to stand on its own, the game was dark, disturbing and satanic. The problem was, the storyline was so ambitious that it got pretty sloppy and weird at the end, with some plot details (such as a drug cult) not as fleshed out as it should have been. This game fixes things by concentrating on the main character, whose journey to the same town of Silent Hill is brought on by a letter that he received from his wife. Though dead from a fatal illness, her very writing asks James to return to the town, the site of some bittersweet memories for them.

As James travels through town, he meets some strange people who all seem to be off in some way. One is remarkably passive/ aggressive, one is suicidal, one is a little girl who seems to know him, and one of them is a woman who looks just like his dead wife, which brings out some conflicting emotions in James. These characters come and go as the game goes on, and they occasionally do some odd things. But the beauty of the story is that, when all is said and done, the motivation for these characters makes absolute sense- once you realize what they mean to James and why they're in Silent Hill in the first place. Whereas the first game unravels with a lot of obscure mythological references to religious artifacts and demonic possession, this one is strengthened completely at its conclusion, a conclusion that makes us rethink the motives and actions of every character in the game.

This is true of the game's biggest, most dynamic character- Pyramid Head. An apparent humanoid with a strange, triangular shape of flesh or metal on (or in place of) its head, this character represents sheer malice to James. From the moment he discovers it in an abandoned apartment building to the time he discovers hints of its origins, Pyramid Head is one of, if not the most, creepy of the series' foes. He isn't all over you in the game but instead appears occasionally from the shadows, often when you least expect him, slowly but steadily approaching James as he tries to flee. And once you learn what little you can of him near the end, it adds to the finale more than any of the other characters. Pyramid Head has a purpose, and once it's revealed what that purpose is, that great ending starts to form and you realize how psychologically powerful this game is.

All this story would be moot if there wasn't a good presentation, which there definitely is. Like the original game, your character wanders around a misty, fog-enshrouded abandoned town where nothing feels right and glimpses of things skittering about are caught. The game starts slowly, intentionally- don't get too impatient when first running through the woods and into town, it's meant to be suspenseful and build the mood. And by the time you're an hour or so into the game, what a mood it is. This game contains what's surely one of the most unsettling locations in the series- at one important juncture you enter the town's historical society and descend several hundred feet into ground, only to find a morgue, bloody pits that go farther and farther down, and Silent Hill's long abandoned underground prison. This location alone sets some great mood, as you see scrawls of long-dead prisoners and hear things from unseen places (listen for the heavy footsteps of something that seems to be whispering "Hurt you").

The mood is also heightened by little glimpses of the town that you find. You read about a grisly child killing and hear about a mysterious shipwreck, and learn the fascinating story of why a swamp got its bloody name. Like the first game, things are never quite right- but once "the darkness" falls, things get more twisted and you're in a nightmare world. And this world seems tailor made to oppress James.

This is the first in the series to allow both free roaming controls as well as the remote-control car style used in the original game, and other things, such as the boxes of bullets and first aid kits, will be familiar to players of the first game. As will the radio that emits louder and louder white noise as you approach, and the trusty flashlight (which you'll definitely be using). So it's the same gameplay to those familiar with the series and other games like it. Puzzle difficulty is actually adjustable and quite easy on the simplest level, so this game won't have you running for a strategy guide. Unfortunately, combat is also somwehat simple. There are some neat boss fights but the rest of the game is more about exploring, not fighting (though there's a lot to fight should you choose). But this lean on exploration is appreciated since this game gives you the biggest glimpse into what Silent Hill is really like.

Lastly, there's the basic version of this game and then the updated one for several systems that contains a few new options as well as a new mini-quest revolving around the character of Maria. This is the one to get, as price-wise they're about the same, but don't expect much- the new quest is less than an hour long though it does add some interesting perspective to the game.

Long story short, it's the same Silent Hill that you may have liked in part one, and before things got increasingly less Silent Hill-ish with the next couple games. So play this game for the most definitive, moody Silent Hill in the series, and for the best, most understandable story as well- one of the best and most mature game stories in general. After all, Roger Avery, Oscar winning co-writer of Pulp Fiction, is doing the Silent Hill movie- and this one's his favorite too.

this is a Renter

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 18
Date: August 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Don't waste your money buying this one. The best part of the game is hunting down the items and clues. The controls are lame, zombies are all the same (and not much of a challenge). The whole game is not scary at all, if you are scared by this game you seriously don't need to watch ANY horror movies! It really needs more variety of enemies and a better weapon selection. Truly the WORST X box game I ever owned. The first thing I did when I beat this game is SELL IT!!!

Scary even on begginer mode!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: April 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams is different than many other of the series. Silent Hill 3 tries to catch more intensity, trying to catch the players attention and makes them want to play more. Silent Hill 4 was just scary and was very dramatising. Silent Hill 2 caught drama and made a story so good it is still in people minds and hearts today.

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