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Yet another reason not to leave your apartment.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 86 / 97
Date: July 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill 4 is some scary scary stuff, but that is nothing that years of therapy cannot fix. That being said, you must now obtain this game. This review is of the Japanese Import of the came, but the US release will be identical in almost every aspect (All the in game dialog is in English, and the menus are multi-language).

It must be mentioned that this game is a departure from the first three of the series, but everything it does different it gets right. The bosses have been removed, but don't worry there is still plenty to back you into a corner and make your cry for mommy. The removal of the bosses has added to the overall fluidity of the game. It seems less like the structured chapter based plot and more like a constant downward spiraling nightmare. The puzzles are a bit more straight forward (not nearly as cryptic as some of the earlier puzzles) and the enemies have become a bit more organic. The skinned dogs are still roaming around but new enemies such as the creepy yeti-babies and ghost/zombies will defiantly keep you on your toes and loosing sleep. I considered the more human of the monsters to be the scariest (Pyramid Head, The Nurses, Blood Soaked Alessa) and this game capitalizes on this.

All of the aesthetic changes are well received like the new health bar and power gauge. The first being so you no longer have to guess at your health via limping or hemorrhaging and stop the game for a inventory check; the second is used for swinging weapons to charge from a moderate THUMP to a full blast body-hurling home-run style WHACK. Two of the biggest departures are the first person perspective mode and the limited inventory. Gone the way of the dodo is the Resident Evil rip-off inventory screen and introduced is the Resident Evil inspired limited inventory. This adds a whole new level to the game being that what items you carry now matter in the sense that you can no longer pick up any more if your inventory is full (and in some parts, what you carry affects the level). No need to worry being that the portal/hole system that traverses you from your room to different `worlds' allows you to go back to your room and store unneeded items in a stylish ottoman/chest placed next to your possessed television. Also to please your inner voyeur, the frist person view allows you to peek out your window to see into your neighbors' apartments and to spy on the single white female living next to you.

Returning SH fans will find that this new addition has much to offer with it's tentacles embedded in plot from all previous Silent Hill titles bringing new light to old events (What was the outcome of James Sunderland's trip in SH 2, What really happened at the Wish House from SH3, etc.). New players stepping up to the challenge will not be disappointed with beautiful detailed graphics and a story line that drives you to dig deeper and deeper until it all makes sense. Konami once again has created an audio/visual attack on the sensed that is truly designed to scare the living crap out of you.

ladies and gentelman theyve done it again

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 25
Date: September 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

yes a new silent hill and by god its just as good i really dont get this can sm1 tell konami there suppose to be gettin worse right to the review games great same great graphics but heres the problem theres a huge leap between normal and easy as in huge like easys too easy and normals like that much harder but that aside the games just like any silent hill same old satanic cult thing going on i still havent finished it but till now the actual game i mean like the riddels are like kinda easy but all in all great game i liked the monsters in this one cuz in two there was this really bad lookin monster the one at the begining but no here there all cool especially this one that comes out the wall hint:dont try and kill him yup invincible storys good as i said i havent finished but till now its building up greatly what else is there ya another con not enough items i mean like not enoguh keys and stuff ive like finished two worlds and i all i used was a key and a coin but as i said all in all great game a definite must in ure collection

A new Silent Hill formula to keep you awake...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: September 10, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I love all Silent Hill games. I love everything about them, from the music, to the graphics, to the storylines intricately woven into each one. Now comes Silent Hill 4 The Room, which is a new story that revolves around the events in all the other games. Well, I shouldn't say that, but the other games have something to do with this one, in one way or another.
I have just beaten this game, and I was quite impressed. The story was good, the graphics were good. But wait, something is missing. Actually, make that three things are missning.

For anyone who have ever played any of the Silent Hill games, you should have noticed certain reoccuring items in 1 through 3.
One, the fog. Two, the radio. Three, the flashlight. None of which make an appearance in the new game. Sure, it is set in the town of Ashfield, near Silent Hill, but still, that only compensated for the missing fog. But what about the other two items? I mean, what's a Silent Hill game without your radio freaking out and your crappy flashlight barely giving you any visibility? I'll tell you what it is, it's a new survival horror game that is never really dark (light-wise).

In fact, it is quite possibly the brightest of all the games. I mean sure, the other games were bright when you were outside, but still. They also had some pitch black areas too. Almost throughout the entire game, everything is well lit. Which won't hurt the games score, but it's just something that i've grown to love in these games. And as for the radio, well, the only thing that comes close is the ghosts making your screen start to mess up and then there's a bit of static, but there's no explanation for it. Well, I guess it makes his head hurt whenever they are near, so it does make sense in that way. But still, even then, he's still lacking that small appliance from his person.

Which is something else, you have a limited amount of items you can carry on you at one time. You have a chest back in your room that you can drop things you don't need at the moment into, but if you accidentally pick up something you didn't really mean to pick up, you have no way of dropping it until you find a hole to get back to your room. So sometimes you'll have to waste a full clip of pistol ammo or use a nutrition drink to clear up a slot so you can pick up the key item you need to take with you. This is probably my only complaint, and it really isn't worth whining about. I do like the on-screen health bar and swing meter, which thankfully fade away after you're out of combat, as does the item selection menu. Because I would be really pissed of if I had to have some freaking crap cluttering up my screen and blocking the gorgeous graphics.

If I can I'd like to add a little here on the new main enemies, ghosts. These apparitions come through the walls and float around chasing you. If they get too close, without even getting their hands on you, you will recieve damage. The coolest one is that of a main (semi-main) character, who, when in ghost form, kind of resembles the little girl from The Ring, you know, the one that crawls out of the television. What I really found cool about this character is when you knock her down, she doesn't always get right back up, sometimes she'll use here arms to pull her around all crazy like on the floor toward you. Pretty creepy.

I know that I don't talk much about the story or the characters in my reviews, maybe that's because I like to sprawl out the rest of the stuff in the game that nobody else talks about. But if you want to know, you play as a man named Henry Townsend. And at the beginning of the game, you have already been trapped in your apartment for five days. The front door is covered in chains and locks and none of the windows open. While in your apartment, you can listen to the radio, if anything is on other than static, look through the peephole to the hallway outside and watch people walk by or have an arguement, look through the hole in your wall in the living room to see into the room next door where a very special girl spends time watching t.v. or painting her nails. But one day, you find a gaping hole in your bathroom wall and decide to ivestigate, upon doing so, you get a steel pipe (i'm glad they atleast left that in there, I sure do like beating things with my steel pipe), and the story begins to unfold. And on the story, while good, it wasn't what I expected. Sure it was twisted and insane, but it just didn't have that punch at the end. No real shocking twist. But oh well, if you liked or loved the other games, buy this one immediately. But I would just like to warn you, this game is totally different from the others. It's not so much Silent Hill 4, it's either The Room or Ashfield Heights.

All in all, a great game, just not a real Silent Hill game. Still spooky though. If it does one thing better than anything else, it's the sense of claustrophobia you get from spending so much time in your room, which you won't want to stay in for too long later in the game...one word: haunted.

And WHAT happened?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: September 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The set up sounded interesting enough. Man trapped in apartment, which showed more signs of decay as the time passed. Man finds hole in wall, and--in his desperation to get out--decided to go inside, and into a hellish adventure. Game, START.

When actually playing the game, though, suddenly you wish that the main character, James Townsend, would just succumb to the monsters, ghosts, and other unnamable creatures trying to kill him. Why? Because nearly everything is wrong with the game.

First, the good stuff: The graphics and the creepy atmosphere is on par and above when compared to its Playstation 2 predecessors. Someone mentioned the graphics is brigher than before, which is a great welcome since I wasn't too much of a fan of the too dark to play atmosphere. The music is on key, providing an appropriately somber welcome during the introduction and an ant-crawing-up-your-spine chills during gameplay. This makes the bonus soundtrack included with pre-orders a gem to own.

Now, the bad stuff. I do not like the new inventory system one bit. You can only carry a small amount of items, and when you accidentally pick up useless ones, you have to trek back to your house (I'll talk about why that gets tiring later) and put it in your magic infinite box. But you can't risk NOT picking up the item, because you MIGHT need it and you need to pick up it up to read the description of it. This limited inventory system is made even worse by the fact that each CLIP of 12 bullets for your first gun (this goes for later firearms, too) takes up one space in your iventory by itself! Sure, in your magic infinite capacity box they take up only one space for all the bullets, but in your pocket, yes, one space per clip. This makes guns a very unreliable source of protection... or you can run home everytime you run out of bullets...assuming you HAD any. Ammo is terrible scarce, even on easy mode. You can rely on your trusty melee weapon near the beginning, but later on, the enemies are too tough, one big healing resource is taken away from you and turned into a source of hp depletion, and you have concerns other than your own life (such as, getting a good ending) to risk just bashing the enemies brains in with a shovel.

Adding to even more trips back to your pad is that fact that the only place to save is on a notebook in your apartment. So yes, you have to go there everytime you want to save. Horrible! When I'm in the middle of the story, I don't want to make an extra special trip back to my apartment just so I don't lose an hours worth of play.

Healing items are also scarce, so in the first half of the game, anytime you needed to heal up your HP, you run home and wait for your HP to fill back up.

The trip back to and from the apartment through the hole in your wall gets tiresome around the fifth time to do it. Leaving the apartment, you get the same animation for "warp speed into the depths of despare through a stone pipe" everytime, and no matter how many buttons I press, I can't skip that movie. Same thing with returning to your apartment, you have to endure the annoying "James is not a morning person" ritual of getting out of bed that takes WAY too long for it to be fun when you're on a routine trip back to your place for a save or to drop off some items.

The ghost enemies are the most annoying enemies I've ever encountered. At first I was scared, since I couldn't kill them and their mere presence depletes your HP, but soon they just grew into a pain in the rear. In a certain level, there were a lot of narrow passageways. If a ghost were to approach (and they approach fast), you would have to take it down (you can stun them) before proceeding... that would have been fine, if its undead body doesn't block your walkway! So you find yourself in a hopeless situation that causes you to find the nearest exit, leave, and come back into the room, hoping you can outrun the ghost this time before it blocks your path.

Okay, so this could be made up with a great story. Silent Hill 3 wasn't the most innovative in gameplay, but the GREAT backstory made up for the small number of flaws and made it a fantastic horror experience. This time, the story could not overcome all the problems with gameplay. Bits of the story is revealed as you play, but it just doesn't happen fast enough for is not riveting enough to keep me interested. James seems like a nice enough guy, but since you mostly encounter the dead, or people who aren't key to the story for the first half of the game, you don't find out too much about James at all.

I've been a big fan of the Silent Hill series since the first game came out, but this one is just utterly dissapointing. I know they didn't rush it, but the problem might be they tried too many things that just didn't work. I'm a fan of creative innovation, but just because it's new doesn't mean I'll praise it. Back to the drawing board with you, Konami!

A very changed, but phenomenal Silent Hill game!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: September 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I just played this game and am just about half way through the whole game and I have to confess "This game does differ from the other Silent Hill games" but this is in a good way.
This game tells the story of Henry Townshend, a guy who lives in Ashfield, a town not far from Silent Hill. One day, he starts having nightmares that are being repeated every night, since then, he has not be able to step outside his apartment because of the dozen locks all over his door with a note :
Don't Go Out
Walter
As I said before this game has changed from the other Silent Hill games, and I actually like Konami's new gameplay. For instance, in this game, you don't have a radio of static or a flashlight (cuz most of the places you will visit are very bright atmospheres and is easy to spot a monster in it's tracks), which I feel has been a great idea by Konami. In the last Silent Hill games, the atmospheres seemed to be so incredibly dark, even I could not go through the game smoothly, and I think that's what Konami was trying to do, make the horror "smoothly" at a great pace. To explain, the scares in this game aren't up to the ranks of Silent Hill 3, but the scares in this game feel "smooth" and not a HUGE scare at one minute and a LITTLE scare after that. Silent Hill 4 has scares that I can say runs "smoothly" and won't make you want to shut off the game because of how scary it is, and I actually like that. Great thought and idea Konami for trying this method of scares. They feel so much classical and, again, "smoothly"!
Another thing different in this game from the other Silent Hill games is the gameplay part. In the middle of gameplay, in order to swithc a weapon, you ACTUALLY CANNOT put the game on pause...NOW you have to switch weapons during gameplay, which is to make the switching weapons more realistic. Most of the weapons you have in the game are pipes, baseball bat, and very few firepower but the melee weapons are still your trusty and main weapons in this game.
The grpahics, as people have also said before me, has slightly improved from Silent Hill 3. I shouldn't really be saying the graphics are better in this game cux it sounds like SH3's graphics weren't phenomenal like these. On a scale from 1 to 10 on graphics, I pick 11 cuz these graphics I guarantee cannot ANY MORE realistic, they're so realistic, it's scary!!!
Overall, I love this game and is a good welcome to newcomer Silent Hill fans because this game is a little more easier than the other Silent Hill games, so newcomers will be comfortable with this game. When your ready, newcomers, you can play TWICE as scared in the other games, but first start out with this game. Muhwahahahaha!

Not Quite Silent Hill

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: September 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

At the beginning of the game, Henry Townshend has been trapped in his South Ashfield apartment for three days when, suddenly, a hole appears in his bathroom that takes him to strange worlds.

My problem with Silent Hill 4 is that Henry really isn't the focus of the game. The story, unlike the previous SH games, is more about the other characters. I also wish they could have given him more of a personality.

Graphics/Sound: Definitely an improvement on the previous games. The rusty iron grates finally look realistic and there are many sounds to make your skin crawl. The voice acting is well done as well and the overall feel of the game is nearly ten times as creepy than the previous games, even if it isn't quite the same.

Gameplay: while new and at times refreshing, has many flaws. You can only hold 12 items now (you must drop off items you don't need at your apartment). The trip back to the apartment is where it gets really annoying. Anytime you need an item or need to drop one off, you have to find a hole and go back to the apartment.

Now the enemies. The ghosts that are very creepy soon get very annoying and hinder the overall fun. The other enemies are also very annoying (the bean sprout things and the bats being the most annoying). I do like the first-person view of Henry's apartment, though (first-person camera being a first for the series). Makes it creepier to see it from his perspective.

Surprisingly, the story is the weakest point. I don't want to ruin it for people wanting to play it, so i won't reveal story details. But it isn't as gripping as previous installments and the story is almost predictable. Maybe it's because it doesn't really have anything to do with Henry for the most part.

All in all, it's disappointing because there isn't really much connection to the plots of the Silent Hill games 1-3 and Silent Hill in fact. Most of the game doesn't even take place in Silent Hill! I miss the fog and the flashlight...

Graphics: 10 out of 10 (slightly better than Silent Hill 3)
Sound: 10 out of 10 (still creepy as ever)
Story: 7 1/2 out of 10 (just wish it tied in more with Silent Hill)
Characters: 8 out of 10 (really 9 minus a point for Henry)
Gameplay: 7 out of 10 (the enemies and the trek back to the room get really old really fast, what was probably a good idea at first gets tiring after a while).

Some Good, Some Bad

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: September 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill 4 is by far the farthest departure in the Silent Hill franchise, plenty more actions and less scare. The days of where one could treks around the town of Silent Hill are gone for good, and replaced by a more task center type of gaming. The atmosphere, the creepiness, and the bizarreness that makes the first three Silent Hill games so different are gone also, and replaced by more efficient game play.

Silent Hill 4 is not bad, but it just not what I had expected from the other three games. The changes that I dislike are, first, the ghosts which at first scary but there so many of them and you can't kill them will soon became annoying. Second, The amount of items that Henry can carry at one time also bugs the heck out of me, the concept just makes the whole game play slow and repetitive everytime when you discover that you don't have the right item you need. Third, halfway through the game, Henry gets to play bodyguard for someone for the rest of the game, which becomes a chore very fast and gets him kill often. Fourth, at some points of the game, one gets the feeling that the game makers have cut some corners in order to rush Silent Hill 4 out.

The things in the game that I like are, first, the quirkiness of the game where Henry can spies on his neighbors through the peepholes and windows. Second, the music and the sound effects, they are spot on to make the game play better.

All-in-all, Silent Hill 4 is the weakest outing for the franchise. It could be much, much better it the producrs would just take their time and not have to rush to release this game.

Stepping Backwards

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 13
Date: September 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Ok, so I could not believe in the bad press until I played through this game myself. This is the first SH game I didn't really enjoy. There is so much that is just wrong with it that it starts to overtake that which is new or innovative. Basically you play through 5 generic levels.......then you get to struggle through the same identical 5 levels with a limping companion who gets injured easily and who gravitates into conflicts with invincible enemies (I am not kidding). Some of the monsters/ghosts are creepy the first time you see them (which is saying something seeing how you don't encounter them in the dark with a flashlight) but lack the originality of SH2 or SH3 and have seemingly nothing to do with the storyline. The story is a re-hash of "Seven" morphed with "Nightmare on Elm Street" with a main villain who is about as scary as some trendy 20-something actor playing a serial killer in any boring 20-something neo-horror flick (not to mention Henry). Your room is an interesting and engaging concept but doesn't equate to what the spralling town of Silent Hill did for SH1 & SH2. Lastly, there is the soundtrack. Whoever thought to put a weak neo-metal ballad vocalist and a Peter Murphy wanna-be singing the lamest lyrics ever over the soundtrack needs to seriously explore another direction. On the SH3 soundtrack it was annoying and embarrassing, now it just sucks. Konami needs to put "quality" back into this series (no repeating levels, no RE item system) and seriously reconsider the nuances between scary and annoying game play.

That giant sucking sound....

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 18
Date: September 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

You hear is Konami destroying this once proud franchise. I suffered through this game out of my dedication to the series alone, and the only thing that horrified me was that I continued to play it. Damn you Konami. Damn you.

Excellent

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: September 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

God forbid that Western gamers ought to ever be expected to try something original!

In the wake of all the bad and mediocre reviews I've seen here for this game, I'm finally beginning to understand why the US and Europe are responsible for a good two-thirds of the the mundane sequels that we, as gamers, see released on a week to week basis.

Annihoo, "Silent Hill 4: The Room" is indeed a sequel, but an original one. Konami have made many changes to the gameplay mechanics and general 'feel' of the game, while retaining the more well-loved features of the series to date.

Players control Henry Townsend, housebound for some five days (thanks to the enormous chains all over the inside of his apartment door), as he begins to uncover something of the evil behind his apartment, his neighbours, and a nearby town called Silent Hill.

Gameplay-wise we're looking at practically a whole new Silent Hill. The radio and flashlight are now missing, as are the menu screens. Players now make selections via the D-Pad and the circle button, all in realtime, and since Henry's inventory is no longer bottomless, a "Resident Evil"-esque Item Box system has been employed (albeit far more realistically). Levels, towns and Bosses are all gone by the board, replaced with a Quake-ike "Hub" system - you access various different realms via Henry's apartment - but the game does, in fact, feel a lot more organic for this. There's a real sense of progression and, thanks to the fact that ammo and health items are far, far scarcer than in previous games, there's a much deeper sense of "Survival Horror" about this one.

Controls are tighter, and Henry moves a lot faster than Harry, James or Heather before him. The actual mechanics of movement will be immediately familiar to anyone who's played a Silent Hill game before, and the new speedy controls come into their own when trying to avoid the un-killable ghosts and super-lithe dog-monsters.

In fact, the enemies that populate "The Room" are definitely the scariest-looking since SH 2. The Nurses now resemble something like Egyptian Dog-Gods, and those damn Monkeys from SH 1 are back with a vengeance (as well as a second head!).

Graphically this is the real King of the Silent Hills. Advancing on the already-amazing character models from SH 3, "The Room" is populated by a whole host of impressively-detailed and realistic protagonists, and the animation is very fluid (if not so much as SH 3). Landscapes are now more grim and repulsive than SH 2 (but thankfully, not the teen-goth-pretentiousness of the SH 3 worlds) and the vignettes are as imaginative as they are ambiguous. Remember the "What the hell is that??" feeling of SH 2, that was almost absent in SH 3? It's back, and the atmosphere benefits hugely from it.

The sound is by far and away the best sound in a Silent Hill game to date. From the haunting and melancholic opening tune ("Goodbye") to the human and animal sounds that populate the eerie worlds, there's a wealth of aural abomination waiting to be enjoyed. It adds huge amounts of atmosphere and, perhaps more importantly, scares, to the proceedings. Voice acting is excellent (Henry's shyness and ambiguity add greatly to our appreciation of him as the hero) and on a par with some of the better horror movies I've seen lately.

Story-wise, while it can't compare to the magnificent Silent Hill 2, "The Room" is certainly one of the stronger games of the series in this regard. You need to complete the first third of the game before any of the real characterisation comes into play, but when it does, you feel an immediate attachment to the cast, and the compelling natures of characters like Eileen and the Child pull you further into the plot.

Weighing in at a far longer play length than SH 3 (as well as a slightly steeper difficulty level), "The Room", with its four different endings and numerous chilling set pieces, will never compare to Silent Hill 2, but is a definite step in the right direction after the lacklustre and dull Silent Hill 3. It's a sort of cross between the Adventuring aspect of the original game, with the melancholic atmosphere of the second, and the super-cool graphics of the third game. The innovations and gameplay changes won't suit all fans, but I promise you, approach the game with an open mind, and you'll not be disappointed.

Very highly recommended.

By the by, the now-ubiquitous Hospital level is present, but isn't the same damn building, and, though very short, is also very affecting.

Well done to Konami for making some brave and fresh changes to one of its best-loved series of games.

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