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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!

Worst Game Ever?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 16
Date: December 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

In my opinion, save your money. This is the worst game I have ever played in my life! What a joke.

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.

DISAPPOINTING

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: November 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

SILENT HILL and SILENT HILL 2 seemed to be the beginning of a FANTASTIC theme for a long line of games. SILENT HILL 3 came along and it appeared too rushed and weak. No scary atmosphere, no interesting characters, just a feeble attempt at making a quick buck on the SILENT HILL wagon. The WORST of the series...until SILENT HILL 4.

This game is really quite ridiculous. You would have thought that, with the success of the first two games, they would have put just a LITTLE more effort into newly released entries. The gameplay is mediocre, the theme is really uninspired, the atmosphere is COMPLETELY lost, heck, the whole idea about SILENT HILL is the town itself. Just like the 3rd entry, you aren't even IN SILENT HILL for the most part!!! Part way through the game, the designers seemed to just give up and force you to repeat areas that you already spent so much time getting through. That, in itself, is aggrivating.

The recent SILENT HILL entries do not come anywhere near the first and second games and thats a shame. A good thing has come to a sorrowful end.

R.I.P. SILENT HILL

Stepping Backwards

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 13 / 16
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.

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.

beware of the 39.99 game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: September 10, 2004
Author: Amazon User

With video games, it seems you get what you pay for, and with the exception of expansions, games that have had the appropriate amount of time and talent put into them are $49.99. So when I saw Silent Hill 4 for $39.99, I was suspicious. However, being a fan of Silent Hill 2 (3 never came out for xbox), I figured it was worth a try. Big mistake (and I think it speaks volumes that Amazon has ALREADY dropped the price by a few bucks only two days after its release). As noted in a previous review, the camera angles kill the game. You are constantly looking at your feet, your face, or walls. If you are lucky enough to see the enemy in front of you, you can't see the one behind you until it has already attacked. The attack system is awful, too. Bullets are useless, and it takes about 20 hits or so with the pipe to kill the enemy. The "story" is completely derivative, with many scenes and effects taken straight out of horror movies like The Ring. The first 15 minutes of the game was one clip after another, interspersed with walking around until enough time has elapsed in order to play another clip. Saving the game requires running all the way back to the apartment, which you'll want to do after killing an enemy or two (seeing how long it takes to finally lead-pipe them to death)...otherwise, you'll find yourself loading up the last save which typically loses you ten or fifteen minutes of work. The game barely breaks out of the "one star" categories only because the atmosphere and sound is effectively creepy. Overall, a huge disappointment and one that is headed straight for the "bargain bin" at EB's.

Walk Smash Repeat

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: December 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game has a great atmosphere, but thats it. I found it very repetative and dull. The HUD is a bit confusing and it just isn't practical. Walk around for 20 minutes, creepy music plays kill the monsters go back to you room for the next clue - Repeat - repeat repeat.

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.

Same Creepy Atmosphere, Same Lack Of Real Fright

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: December 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is a good effort on the part of Konami. They thought to spice things up a bit by including a forced first-person view mode for key moments in the game. Unfortunately it's not used to maximum effect. Ultimately Silent Hill 4 only offers more of the same, and that's disappointing to those of us used to it.

With the available subject matter you'd think Konami would put together a more chilling experience. Instead we're treated to the same visually compelling yet fright-limited gameplay the last Silent Hills offered. This series is known for it's creepy atmosphere. That's good, but a great survival-horror game combines atmosphere with frightful action, and that's where Silent Hill slips up. I can only recall one experience in Silent Hill 4 which really sent shivers up my spine, and nothing actually happened in it! Too often does the game make you think something terrifying is about to happen but doesn't. Expecting a sudden, monstrous noise in the background to scare players doesn't cut it anymore.

The storyline in these games has always been an issue for me. The plot, while interesting, just doesn't seem to congeal well as you progress through the game. The other Silent Hills also suffered from this. Any game that requires you to search the internet for a better understanding of it's storyline has problems. And what's with the difficulty in seeing multiple endings this time? Two of the four possible endings require keeping your partner character healthy throughout the entire time she's with you...an extremely frustrating task. I never had so much trouble viewing all the endings to a Silent Hill game.

With all that being said, I had a good time playing Silent Hill 4. I liked the voice acting, the first-person viewing mode, and the few changes they made to the play style. I just wish Konami would tweak the series' weaknesses to give us players a more terrifying experience. Then we'd have a perfectly gruesome, mature horror game.

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