No big spoliers here...just random thoughts and Silent Hill 5 discussion...
Okay...
I bought Silent Hill: Homecoming the day it came out and have been playing it every day since, but it has raised more than a few questions for me.
First...Does anyone else feel that the puzzles and bosses are a little unbalanced? The first boss is easy to kill, the second is pretty tough, and the one I'm on now is REALLY tough. It's that ugly centipede looking thing with multiple torsos and arms.
The puzzles are challenging and random. Some involve some thought and some are solved through dumb luck. The "puzzle" puzzle in the attic seemed like a simple task, but turned out to be a pain in the butt puzzle (it took me well over an hour to finally arrange the pieces and solve it). By the time I solved it and continued, I couldn't even remember what I was doing as the whole game came to a screeching hault.
I don't mind puzzles in my games, as I'm a veteran of survival horror games and love them all (RE 0-4/Silent Hill/Dead Rising/Alone In The Dark/etc...), but to be that stuck on a simple puzzle made me so frustrated that I ALMOST popped out the disk and put it in my "get rid of" pile. I pushed on and got a little further, but now I'm stuck again!
Silent Hill V is a good game graphically and story wise (kinda), and the combat controls are decent, but the problem I see with this game is the pacing and overall vibe. For a survival horror game it's not really very "scary", as most of the time you totally know when something is going to jump out. It's almost as if the makers decided to blend Silent Hill and Resident Evil, with mixed results.
If they we going for the creep factor, they should've focused on that and given the player a little more time to absorb the story and the spooky surroundings. It's kinda hard to be scared of something when you know that it's around the corner because that weird scratching sounds starts playing, alerting you to the fact that there is something nearby and wanting to kill you (I'm on "normal" difficulty, so is that scratchy sound not in the hard difficulty setting?).
If you're outside and running around in fog, the scratchy sound starts usually giving you plenty of time to reload, switch weapons, and prepare for battle. IT was effective in the other games and in movies like The Grudge, but that was then and this is now. Give us something NEW!
I like the game (I guess), but to be honest I think I'm trading this at GameStop toward Dead Space later this month.
I'm stuck on the centipede looking boss and simply cannot beat her. If I wanted to spend $60 and get REALLY frustrated at a game, I should've spent $50 on beer and $10 on a Rubik's Cube.
What do you think of this game?
