4/5 ★ – LCSnoogs's review of SILENT HILL 2.

This is a good survival horror game. Not a great one and definitely not one of the greatest of all time. I don't know if that's because this remake didn't capture what was special about the original or if I would've felt the same about the original. It's not that it's doing anything wrong. It's that it rarely does anything exceptional. The combat is good. It has satisfying gun and melee sound effects, but there isn't any special mechanics or weapons to make it stand out. The game also stops introducing new enemies after the hospital, the second major location, leaving a lack of enemy variety. It's difficult to scare when the enemies are all so familiar. I had issues with a few of the boss fights in the game where it became difficult for me to tell if I was shooting an enemy in the right place. It could've used more visual feedback to let me know if I was doing damage or not like some blood splatter or something. There are other boss fights in the game where it does show blood splatter, so I don't know why that wasn't consistent for all of them. The puzzle and exploration deliver on what you'd expect: moving through rooms, unlocking doors, gathering items, and putting them together. My one criticism of this is most of the locations are similar. The apartment building, hospital, and hotel are all full of small rooms and narrow hallways providing the same experience. The prison and the labyrinth are the only locations that shake things up. The prison is the standout of the game. It's the third major location. It's mostly dark leaving my flashlight to provide limited view. An enemy type I've been fighting since the early parts of the game gains a new ability to crawl around on the walls. I can hear them crawling all over the place making me on edge the whole time. What's worse is that the walls go so high that they can crawl outside the reach of the beam from my flashlight. This section was intense in a way that reminded me of The Evil Within. This is high praise from me because that's one of the best horror games I've ever played. The story never grabbed me. Maybe because this is my first Silent Hill game and it's the second game in the series, but there was a lack of questioning what the fuck is going on that struck me as weird. The game was trying and failing to create some intrigue. The strange characters take me out of the story more often than they pull me in. I did find the ending satisfying at least. I hear there are eight different endings, but this game isn't worth revisiting to see them.