Silent Hill: Downpour Rained On My Parade

Where to begin? As a hardcore Silent Hill fan and an impatient admirer for this new installment, I am extremely disappointed. Lead character, Murphy Pendelton, is in prison and being transferred to a different facility. While in transfer, his bus crashes and he escapes. Murphy wanders into an unfamiliar town known as Silent Hill (of course, very familiar to the rest of us). I will note a couple positive things about the game, proving the new developers did acknowledge the complaints of die-hard fans. The use of weapons in this game was purely based on luck and what you manage to find in the area. You pick up a weapon and use it until it breaks. There are rocks everywhere that you can utilize. Fence posts are also pretty abundant. As you travel deeper into the game, weapons become more advanced, such as a fire ax (my personal favorite) and guns. Why is the fire ax my favorite? Easy. It gets the job done and while you're at it, you can smash off the boards into the next room without running around trying to find the appropriate weapon to do so. Saves time and energy. I liked this new system, I'll admit. I wasn't out of bullets or weapon-less, ever. Matter of fact, I think I played through the game using a shot gun maybe, a few times? I stuck with the fire ax, mainly. Thank GOD for auto-save! Finally,  new Silent Hill developers ditch their annoying save system, where it depended on the character reaching the next save point in order to advance. I hated dying, and having to go way back to my last save point and do everything ALL over again. Abundance of health pickups was incredible, almost too easy at some times. I always had health kits readily available and never ran out. Since you can now choose to bitch out on a fight and run for your life, health isn't that much of a concern unless facing a boss. By then, you are all stocked up on health kits. A huge complaint about earlier games was a lack of health kits which made the games incredibly hard. I am grateful for this, but with the bosses (very FEW bosses) not even being that hard, I did not find myself using a lot of health kits. Sidequests were a great addition to the Silent Hill series. I loved wandering around the town and running into random sidequests. Matter of fact, this was the first time I hadn't gotten lost in Silent Hill. I beat the game using a map and finding my own way and my own items. Sidequests allow for longer gameplay and a stronger need to play through again (if you just wanted to beat the damn thing first, like me). The environment was nicely put together. You can tell someone worked really hard to bring the environment of the new and improved Silent Hill to life. It is unlike any other Silent Hill game, environment-wise. It really sets the mood for a survival horror game. The transformation of the falling ash (from previous games) into fog was a nice touch and made it seem creepier. Although, the ash always confused me as a kid and with a lack of understanding came more fear as to what could be causing the ash. I have mixed feelings about the ash-to-fog change, but nevertheless, it didn't hurt, but rather added to the new environment. Here is an example of a screenshot of the environment.

Now I have a lot of problems with this eighth installment of Silent Hill. Maybe the biggest problem I have with this game is the creature design. All I can say is, it's been done, man. With all of the hype from this game, I really expected something bold and new in terms of creature design. A lot more gore, really f@#$ed up stuff. But what I got was original ideas from previous Silent Hill games built on to. Things I have seen before, or imagined before.

This looks a lot like the scythe-thing from Homecoming (I think it was that game), that had the sickle hands and crawled everywhere, not the lurker, but something else. The name escapes me. But only this has normal hands. Really, this doesn't scare me, and because this design is not scary, they make it jump out at you a lot in the game to make it scary. Here is another example of the another creature from Downpour.

I'm not kidding, these things rode around in police cars in Silent Hill, and if they saw you, they stopped and attacked in swarms of four or so. What is even going on in the face here? It seems Downpour went with a more gloomy tone of design rather than a gore-filled collection. This feels very "Japanese-teen-horror" to me, like the film The Ring. After the first couple times of killing these things (and they are EVERYWHERE), I got bored with it and it became to easy to kill.

Another new introduction to the list of enemies was the mannequin, and I can admit, it sure fooled me the first time I came in contact with it. You can see in the middle image as it stands as a mannequin. Once you get close enough, ghostly shadows of the figure run around the room attacking you while the shell waits and watches. In terms of design, this was my favorite in the game. Very creative and successful.

Yes, believe it or not, this is an enemy. If you ask me what it is, I can only respond with I don't know what the hell it is and I never really found out. The depths of Murphy's hellish past coming back to attack him? I dunno. All I know is I had to run, fast, to get away from it or it would kill me. I absolutely disagreed with the existence of this insignificant enemy. It was a total waste of time, running into things and down wrong corridors. The appearance of the red eye did nothing for my character or the story. A failure in character design and one really annoying portion of the game.

And finally, you have these guys, who are mostly hiding out in the prison. Sometimes they have crazy chained people with them, and sometimes they don't. Aside from this one guy above with the cool dog people, you are usually fighting mutant human beings that pop out of jail cells as you run past. BORING! Give me something that spits blood, or scales the walls like a spider. These guys got annoying, really fast. Especially when they fight in groups, it takes a while to get the pattern down in tackling them. I got bored. That's it for character design. That's the game, pretty much. Besides the final boss, who turns out to be crazy easy once a routine is obtained in his destruction, there aren't really that many significant Downpour characters; and I don't want to spoil the final boss for you. Therefore, there is a TOTAL lack of characters in comparison to other Silent Hill games. Moreover, where the heck are my nurses at? I guess developers thought it was time to ditch the nurses and the famed Pyramid Head. They weren't needed, but the game could've used way more enemies. So was this game too easy? Maybe, I might have to bump up the difficulty level next time. Story lacked, GREATLY. I breezed through this game and by the end cut scene, I had no idea what had happened. Nothing made sense! Nothing added up or came together with the ending I had, like I had hoped. So, what, play through it again? Maybe for the sidequests, but after finishing it in five days (that's with full school days and work), I thought I'd wait til it went on clearance. Maybe one day someone will create a whole new survival horror game that will fill that emptiness inside of me that has resided there since the completion of Silent Hill 2. Some screenshots of creatures from Silent Hill Homecoming, for comparison.