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A let down for fans.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I love Silent Hill. Happiness was the day a new Silent Hill game came out and I could run to the game store after work to get it. I still get that creeped out feeling when I play Silent Hill 2 or 3 in the dark. If a game makes it hard to fall asleep, it's a good scary game.

Silent Hill 4? There are some fun connections to the other games if you look hard enough. It turns out the landlord of your building in 4 is Mary's father (your wife in Silent Hill 2). But all the connections are little things like that. However that's not enough to make it a bad game.

A bad game is a game that makes you do the same levels over and over again. A bad game has a shaky plotline and endings that don't make it worth it to play over and over again. A bad game takes the scariest level in it's previous games (the hospital level. Every Silent Hill game has one and they're all pretty damn scary) and makes you laugh instead of fear. THE NURSES BURP WHEN YOU HIT THEM WITH A PIPE! NO JOKE! It sounds like they drank a bottle of soda before they decided to try and kill you. It's not scary, it's not even that funny, it's kind of sad.

Other than that, the game has a decent soundtrack, your room can get quite scary if you let it, and although none of the characters are all that likeable, I ended up growing attatched to Cynthia.

If you're a Silent Hill fan, you should play it just to play it. If you're not you might still enjoy it because it's quite different then the rest of them. It just didn't compare to the other three.

unique and engaging but not quite achieved

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: May 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The room entales events before silent hill 2 i believe. The 1st person aspect has great, but needs more solid ground. The story behaves like it should and ties up loose ends about the killings fetured in the second silent hill. I'm not to fond of this one having ghosts that can't be killed or dispelled, which drops the replay value on this one. Controls handle well and the swing gauge is a great feature. this one seems short also.
if they make another, why not incorporate the camera from resident evil 4 and keep the swing meter that may increase a stronger sense of emergency, while allowing precise aiming control of your guns. no one ever said james succeeded or failed. I think he needs to finish what he started.

Don't waste your money!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: October 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

[...]
Being an avid fan of the survival horror genre, I naturally bought this title. I ended up throwing it out a few days later. The only thing I really liked about the game was its first-person perspective.
You begin in an eerie, locked apartment room. Soon you discover what is essentially a portal to a haunted subway system in the bathroom. Sounds engaging, right? It is, thus far. Upon entering, the first thing I noticed here were the bothersome ghosts. You can attack them only to discover that they, being ghosts, cannot be "killed," thus you're stuck with them, following you, trying to suck the life out of your every other second. After circumventing these, I decended into the main subway area only to encounter more. Now they were hampering my mobility. Whenever I tried to pass or traverse any other area of the subway, I encountered them. It was annoying. At least allow me to investigate my surroundings! I played for about 20 minutes longer like this before I shut off my PS2 and took out the game. This is the kind of game that, because of it's difficulty level, makes you frustrated enough to stop playing it.
If you want to enjoy the SH series, I recommended trying to find SH2 (I found it used at Blockbuster) or even SH3. As for survival horror, I highly recommend Fatal Frame 2 (there's also a FF3 coming out 11/05) or Resident Evil 4.

Silent Hill?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am a tremendous Survival Fan, I own even the lesser known titles such as Over Blood and the Ring. Silent Hill is one of my all time favorites, I was hooked from the first title. Silent Hill has a surreal and over all creepy atmosphere to it. There is often darkness, fog and decay in their stories. I have loved 1, 2 and 3. I had my hopes pretty high for Silent Hill 4. Unfortunately those hopes were wasted.

This game would have been fun if it was apart of the Silent Hill Franchise, but the moment they slapped that label on that game they basically rose the bar too high. Silent Hill 4 is dull and just not very interesting. It had some nice effects, some interesting characters and that is about it. The Monsters aren't even remotely interesting in this installment. They had evil monkeys for god sake!

The Ghost were kind of nice, but this isn't Silent Hill. It wasn't even very difficult but I made it nearly to the end, lost interest just out of pure and utter boredom and stopped for months before wanting to finish. I never did that with any other Silent Hill title. This was a most unfortunate sequal.

This game sucks!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: April 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Boring, boring - be prepared to waste hours retracing your steps and running into dead ends. The pace is slow, the story is twisted, or non-existant. After playing it a few days I got stuck and spent a lot of time re-playing several scenes. You'll have more fun lighting your foot on fire. For a good sci-fi horror game, get Doom3. For a bad one, get this game - I'd be happy to give it to you.

Come On Eileen...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: April 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I had some major high hopes for the latest in the Silent Hill franchise, it sounded great, and after watching the truly chilling pre-title sequence to the game, I cranked up the surround sound, and dived in.. And overall I have to say that I was really disappointed.

Silent Hill 4 continues in effectively the same tradition as the previous installments. A third person action/adventure game using the same fixed angle cameras, grainy filtering, and a bizzarrely unsettling collection of characters creatures and demons. It centres around a guy called Henry, who awakes in his appartment one day to find it totally sealed up from the inside, a note painted in blood on the inside warning him not to go out, and after some poking around discovers a small hole in the bathroom, which takes him to strange alternate worlds beset with ghosts, demons and curiouslyt interwoven with reality. Henry soon finds himself embroiled in the work of a serial killer, somehow related to his own appartment, and must battle to uncover the truth about Walter, and set himself free from the room.

The big plus point really is the inclusion of the first person section in the room itself, and the sometimes unsettling use of the peepholes, sounds, and other effects in the appertment. In fact I would say that all of the decent scares actually come from this mode. The actual main game itself was very disappointing. It plays exactly the same as it's predecessors, but whilst the story is engaging, the monotany of getting from one part to another really starts to take it's toll. Essentially from start to finish, the game is nothing more than a collect-these-objects-and-put-them-here type of game, which is pushed along by the insultingly horrible device of people leaving reams of notes and diary entries everywhere which act as nothing more than a list of instructions for you to carry out. That said, the hard difficulty level offers you less help in this way, but there are no Silent Hill 3 style sliders to adjust the difficulty of the arcade sections, so the game becomes very difficult in all regards.

Also and probably more importantly, the Room just isn't really that scary. After a very short while, I just found myself plodding on through it like a normal third person game, it just didn't manage to evoke that same sense of foreboding as previous games that would make you tread slowly, spin round at strange noises, and have you totally on edge at what was lurking in the darkness. The creatures were a let down too on the whole, just seemed nowhere near as inventive or downright disturbing as previous games, although the ghost victims were great and offered an extra dimension to the gameplay.

But probably, above all, the most criminal thing about Silent Hill 4 is the fact that it re-uses every single location that you travel to in the other realm. So you basically end up trudging round the same place two completely different times with different aims, where only a handful of things have changed. This was a dreadful move on the part of the developers. After spending an hour or so exploring the prison world, reading notes, and working your way out of it, the last thing I wanted to do was have to do it all over again in a very sligtly different way a few levels later - it absolutely ripped the soul out of the game.

So who is Silent Hill going to appeal to? Well definitely to hardcore fans of the series, or the survival horror genre in general. Also, the story is strong, and intruiging enough to keep you going - if you're interested in the unravelling of a mystery, it'll also not let you down. But if you love Silent Hill for the scares, creepiness and atmosphere, I wouldn't recommend this particular one in the series, because it falls way short. Also it is really not gonna appeal to you if you're more interested in the adventure side of action/adventure because there are simply no puzzles to solve in this game - merely things to collect, and places to stick them. To people wanting the ultimate Silent Hill experience, Silent Hill 2 is by far and away the best of the series. I don't know if they are going to do a fifth in the series, but if they do I hope that they learn from the mistakes of the Room.

Silent Hill 4-Gains and Loses

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: March 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Having a deep seated desire for the games which can scare the buggers out of a person, The Silent Hill series of games is just the ticket.

The audio and graphics have been much improved throughout the series (recently completed Silent Hill 3). This is truely a game that will have some hairs standing up on the back of your neck. Plus some extra audio effects which the dolby audio makes full use of. Gameplay however? Could stand improvement. The control method was a little "odd" to say the least. The game offers decent control over your person, however some functions did need to be setup in the custom section. The main drawback to this game? Haveing to deal with the same "bad guy" (as I'm trying not to spoil any of the fun) repeatedly as some will not remain "down" for very long. All in all however I feel the game has made decent improvements in graphics and audio. If you are really into "things that go bump in the night" this one's a classic for the collection.

Pros:
Audio quality is excellent: Dolby Surround makes the game come to life
Graphics: Again, quality and attention to detail is outstanding. One could actually count the 5 o'clock shadow stubble on the main players face.
Storyline: Good/fair. In many ways a typical "horror story"..and in other ways very unique.

Cons:
Controller system: A bit on the chunky side. At times hard to stop player exactly where he belongs to interact with items/people
Enemys: Most very scary, graphics again well done..however one 'type' will not stay down after being defeated...annoying, and it gets old fast.

Have a great day!

It has to be said....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It's obvious that many people writing reviews haven't played much of the game. To say nothing noteworthy happens when you spy on the girl next door or out of your peephole proves this. I first felt that this game was rubbish as well, until I finish the first two "levels". The game playes out like a movie in the sense that the first couple of "levels" gives you a foundation for the plot and how the game works. After that the game does indeed get very frightening, but more so disturbing in my view. It just keeps building and building. But you have to stick with it...don't expect it to get really interesting as soon as it starts.
The downsides of the game...1) it's starts off slow..which seems to be the cause of most of the negative reviews. stick with it though.2) for some it will seem very repetitive. It is..but it makes sense to the storyline. Still some people won't like this. 3) It gets really frustrating towards the end.

--- to people writing reviews..If you haven't gotten very far in the game..don't write one until you really know what you're talking about. You're giving false information because of it. Stop.

A total classic! Not a knock-off of Resident Evil.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: February 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a spectacular game. It is horrific, but it's not so much "OH, my god! Im gonna die!" scary, it's more like, "If that was me, I dont know what I'd do!" scary. It kinda gives you that chills. Resident Evil was slightly more "BOOM!" scary. It scared you right then and there with no expectations. But Silent Hill, the story unwravels. It's more like a mystery, which makes it so scary. It is a game of which you are able to veiw your character "3rd Person", but at your apartment, it is "1st person". When you begin the game, you wake up in your apartment and figure out that you were locked in and the clues that the ? has left in your apartment leads you to different worlds that test you skills. The first is the train station. It is very confusing, but try to cut through the two trains as quickly as possible. It is okay if you loose Cynthia, the girl you meet earlier, but you'll find her later. I can't tell you anymore, but the game has a great story, and you later figure out after the subway world that you are not dreaming, you were sucked into hell's reality after you visit at Silent Hill, and others have too (Cynthia). The game is nothing like Resident Evil, it is more scary and has the scariness of the first time you see "The Grudge" and the mysteriousness of "SAW". Spectacular game. It really should be put into a movie. I would reccomend this game for advanced players. It is tough, so get some of your Xbox knowledge stuffed in your brain, because your going to have to use it in "Silent Hill 4: The Room".

THIS GAME BLOWS PEOPLE. BLOWS. BLOWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 15
Date: February 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I think my title and "K"'s review says it all. Unless you've played SH games before, and/or are absolutely a survival/demented horror freak DO NOT BUY. RENT IF YOU ARE CURIOUS, then you'll only be disappointed in a small sum of money wasted.

I can't believe I wasted forty minutes of my life beated retarded dogs with metal poles. I was hoping it would get better or something, trying to find reason for wasting thirty-odd bucks on it...then a ghost showed up and I said Screw this crap. And I played good games like MK Deception and Burnout 3.

People need to get a reality check. Just cause video games are popular now more than ever, new and hyped don't mean good. Old school games like the original MK's, Tekken, old Wolfenstein (for its day), Doom 1 and Rainbow Six were the good stuff. And those arcade fighters, the side scrollers with big guy, the martial artist and the middle man were awesome in their day. And Diablo 2, don't get me started. All these games, IN THEIR DAY, were defining. Revoluntionary. FUN. Halo, Silent Hill, Midnight Club, Quake 2, Half-Life 1 were hyped yesterday and are being hyped today. Someone persuaded the masses somehow to buy them, and I got caught up in it.

Bring back games with imagination and - gasp - an actually satisfying fun factor. These days its hard to find the good ones (Burnout 3, MK Deception, Return to Castle Wolfenstein) amongst the throngs of retarted trash. Grand Theft what? Pixel porn and finding the best way to torture and mutilate people (Punisher, Manhunt). No wonder people think violence stems from video games. By removing the fun and innovation, that's all they got anymore!

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