4/5 ★ – DirtyMidnighter's review of Silent Hill Homecoming.

I have lots to say about this game but I'll try to be brief. Silent Hill: Homecoming is a severely underrated game. It's not a perfect game (or even as good as the original 4 Silent Hills) but it doesn't deserve the majority of the hate it receives. Homecoming is a survival horror game in the classic sense. It's all about creepy atmosphere, resource management, puzzle-solving, exploration and tense enemy encounters. The biggest mark against it is that it simply came out at a time when the survival-horror genre was in a state of existential crisis and it needed a more distinct identity and additional polish in order to boldly steer the franchise into a new era. 3 years earlier, Resident Evil 4 marked a radical shift for the genre by adopting a slick, action-focused gameplay style that expanded upon many of the ideas found in classic survival-horror but made them more approachable for a larger audience. In doing so, it set a new precedent for survival-horror games: they now had to be fun. This transition within the genre happened to occur at the same time that Konami was transitioning the development of the Silent Hill series to new studios as the original Team Silent had called it quits. It was now time to see if this flaship horror series could thrive without the hand of it's original creators. Short answer: yes and no. Like I said, Silent Hill: Homecoming (like the other 3 non Team Silent entries in the series) is good. It just lacks some of that special hard-to-define nightmare sauce that the original 4 games had in spades. Homecoming attempts to be a more action-focused game ala Resident Evil 4 while retaining a heavy dose of that trademark Silent Hill feeling of fumbling in the dark against unspeakable horrors. It kind of lands in a odd space where you have more means than ever to battle said horrors, but doing so can feel a bit clunky and haphazard thanks to a combat engine that is pretty rough around the edges. Combat was never a main focus of Silent Hill and by shining a light on it, you draw attention to how messy it is. That being said, the monsters you fight in this game are superbly designed and definitely hold their own with the best creature designs the series has to offer. Also, this game contains some of the best boss fights in any Silent Hill game. Scarlet, in particular, is one of the most beautiful and frightening enemy encounters in the entire series. Music is handled by series staple Akira Yamaoka and is similarly superb, though at this point you can kind of see him recycling earlier ideas a bit. That's also a problem when it comes to the plot of this game: not enough new ideas. The first 4 Silent Hills were boldly creative in their approach to psychological horror storytelling, so to see recycling of ideas is somewhat disappointing. That being said, the story is good and features some genuinely memorable moments. It's just not quite as brilliant as say, Silent Hill 2, something that became somewhat of a persistent curse for the series. Homecoming is a game that attempts to chart a new course for the Silent Hill franchise. In some ways, it's one of the most ambitions titles in the series. In others, it's crippled by an inability to break free from the stylistic constraints of it's forebears. Homecoming seems like attempt to modernize and reconcile the Silent Hill formula and it almost pays off magnificently. It merely needed more time in the oven. If it had been the answer to Resident Evil 4 it should have been, it could have helped chart a course forward for the genre. Instead, it's turbulent development led to one of the great "what ifs" of gaming and helped usher in an era of survival-horror defined by uncertainty and scarcity. I wholeheartedly recommend checking it out though, because it's a very enjoyable game and it's one of the last of it's kind.