In short: Bad.
In long: Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
Ok lets keep this one short. You are a character whose name i forgot already (considering that i saw endscreen 10 minutes ago that says much) trapped inside your room having terrible nightmares and no one seems to be able to hear you scream for help. Turns out those nightmares aren't nightmares but reality. There is a murder case too, 21 sacraments, you know, the regular "sacrifice people for awaking devil" stuff. There is also a hole in your bathtub that leads to strange worlds that is supposed to be set near silent hill, but only one of them actually acknowledges it and two others are set in some different city totally. you get to visit "all 5 of them" twice. with no need rooms save for one small place. lazy world designers?
the controls are even more unusable than the previous games. mind you i liked the 2 and 3 (though first one i though was way too bad) and controls were bad there too, but other parts made up for it, here it seems they wanted to incorporate this "first person view stuff" that other games did many years ago but totally failed, and you end up changing controls when it goes form first person view into third person view nan vice versa. the awful camera jobs don't help either. the control and way to see stuff is worst of the whole series. the way he aims reminds me of my silent hill 1 struggle, it would rather aim at a harmless slime on the way than a monster that can smack you down across the room and will not change his mind until the slime is dead. The STOMP is back but half the time it refuses to work and continues to whack enemies with weapons, while stomp would be insta-kill.
in weapons department this game seems to have regressed a but too. there are more meele weapons now, but once you get the axe you don't look back and there are two shooting weapons - pistol and revolver. the ammo is so scarce however that you may just as well forget t and use the axe, it does more damage too. and by the time you remember you finally collected enough ammo to kill more than few enemies, you don't need them anymore anyway. even the final boss dies from axe much easier than revolver (supposedly stronger than pistol).
the graphics seems to have went backwards too. it is supposed to use upgraded SH3 engine, but it looks like it use a degraded one. the "cutscenes" are also a total mess. it would have been fine if they weren't using some sort of filter that made it look like it was filmed via 20th century cell phone. most of them are incomprehensible.
the only monster form other games is the dogs, though they are called sniffers here now. other monsters are mostly hilarious. a giant crow with two baby heads or two legs with upside body. but that is all fine if it weren't for ghosts. they are indestructible enemies that drain your life on touch. and you have way too many areas with them. you can trap them with a special sword, but you only have enough swords to trap the "boss" ones anyway. there are also indestructible ghosts in wheelchairs. go figure.
the music is well made as always, but it is made for atmosphere which is lacking. sure there is a lot of moving red carpets, but that doesn't make the game creepy. there are barely any jump scares and no psychological scares. well ok maybe there is one with a giant head. this didn't felt like silent hill game any more, and if the characters weren't referencing to silent hill all the time one would think its not. the story was much more simpler too, but i guess it worked. best dialogue however is when you meet someone in the "nightmare world" first thing you tell them is "we have to go deeper". yeah, that certainly make him tag along.
The clues were a joke compared to previous games. they are pretty much spelled out to you now. go look at this number. go place this card in there. so on and so on.
during second part of the game you also have to drag a severely wounded woman behind you. and i meant DRAG her. she barely moves and you end up soaking damage from ghosts just so she get close enough to register "entering though the door together". if you leave there with them - she dies - game over. I know there is a recent idiotic fad of having a companion in a game, while it may work when playing with a friend it wont with a NPC. but now i know who started it. BURN KONAMI BURN.
Overall this is pretty poor game without its redeeming quality. Xfire registered 11 hours of gameplay, which is more than SH2 but less than SH3. however the game was left in menu for couple hours while i was away yesterday so i guess it counted that too. Save game registers a bit bellow 9 hours, i died once.
Final verdict - 4. This is my third worst rated game after Far cry 2 (3,5) and stalker: clear sky (3,5, seriously i tried to Finnish the game TWICE ad ended up with a savegame that crash couple seconds after loading regardless of what i do in different sectors. this is too buggy for me. i understand if its a rare occasion, but now i didn't even manage to finish the game due to it, the onyl game i haven't finished, well and fallout 1 for same reason, but that was crash when entering final boss room so i let that slide).
Avoid. Only for hardcore SH collectors.
P.S. Yes i know there were no cameras on cell phones in 20th century.
Subject: Silent Hill 4: The Room 
Mon Aug 29, 2011 10:13 am
