Silent Hill Homecoming - Nitro Rad

I trough rat Oh so after sawing hill origins Konami gave the Silent Hill IP to a different American studio last time it was climax games and this time it's a brand new company called double helix Silent Hill Homecoming was the very first game double-helix would create as a development team now we're talking about a legendary IP here Konami clearly doesn't really value their properties very much they're so willing to hand it down to a brand-new studio that's never developed anything before not to mention after homecoming they've put out nothing but fantastic games such as GI Joe Rise of Cobra and green lantern but who knows after the blandness that was origins maybe the modern direction they take the Silent Hill franchise in will do the stale formulas some good the game was released in 2008 for the Xbox 360 in the PlayStation 3 it was the very first Silent Hill game to be on next-gen consoles with HD graphics it was also the very first Silent Hill game to be completely canceled in Japan yeah that's right this game is the only Silent Hill game never to come out in Japan perhaps the Japanese didn't want to see a franchise that once belonged to them ruined by Americanization and believe me when I say this game definitely suffers from Americanization I'll be taking a look at the ps3 version for good measure just like Metal Gear Solid Silent Hill games have always been very native to PlayStation consoles and as a PlayStation gamer myself obviously I'm gonna have the PlayStation versions of the games so anyway enough talk why don't we start a brand new file up and get started wait a mo come on you got to be kidding me again no separate puzzle difficulty come on guys what gives ah whatever origins didn't have it either so I don't know what I was expecting here so Silent Hill Homecoming is about Alex Shepherd a young adult on his way home from his service in the army kind of like Silent Hill 3 the game begins with a nightmare sequence it kicks off with a spooky hospital scene ripped directly out of Jacob's Ladder like seriously this scene is a complete ripoff of that hospital scene towards the end of Jacob's Ladder then again sound Hill too kind of ripped off the Flaming Hotel scene in Barton Fink see it as no mosh if you like but to me it's a little too similar for me to let it slide left alone in his room strapped to a table Alex's doctor leaves and oh my god he gets murdered oh no guys we better get out of here we got a match that X button this is supposed to be so intense but if you just don't push any buttons nothing happens I love that look strapped to that bed for ten minutes and believe me when I tell you that whatever kill a doctor he ain't interested in you in fact nothing is after a long nap Alex finally breaks free from the table we then get to start exploring the spooky Hospital homecoming controls vastly different than any previous Silent Hill game completely gone are the fixed and wide camera angles with a modern third-person camera in its place like any typical third-person game during the ps3 era if you control the camera with the right stick in your character with the left though it's one of those games like re 4 where the character is always facing the direction the cameras aimed at so if you want to turn around and run away from something you have to swing the camera all the way around you 180 degrees before you can do so so it's almost like tank controls but a much weirder version of it a version that doesn't need to exist I mean when you're in full control the camera what's the point because if you try to walk backwards you don't go very fast and this especially sucks when you need to bolt in the opposite direction when a horde of monsters are in your way but since the game lacks the quick turnaround button pass games have you'll be swinging the camera all the way around before you can do that the camera also just feels really sluggish it's weird to describe but it never feels fast or precise enough it's just too floaty subpar controls aside the beginning isn't half bad exploring the building is fun in the puzzles while simple aren't half bad the environment is definitely what I wanted to see from an HD Silent Hill game it hits the mark surprisingly well with the rusty and bloody environments presented in HD if he's seeing stuff like this and his dreams I wouldn't be surprised if you had PTSD from the war you know I can experience PTSD myself every time I see a mirror in this game thankfully Silent Hill Homecoming doesn't have any of that instead we're back to the classic scenarios of Silent Hill 1 where the world would change to the other world and stay the other world until you're finished the level for the first time in series history we actually see a real transition to the other world and is pretty damn rad the way reality literally starts crumbling apart and floating away is just really cool and right here around that corner we get to see the game's very first terrifying creature it's a sexy nurse seriously why why sexy nurses like I stated in the last video James had sexy nurses because of his emotional backstory in his repressed hatred for women it was symbolic just like Travis alex has nothing to do with women his backstory his emotions is it's got nothing to do with women nothing so why sexy nurses why again this is why because it's ironic through the franchise rather than because it actually belongs in the damn game and if you think that's bad Pyramid Head shows up I don't think I even need to explain to you how wrong this is he's literally just there for fanservice you only see them twice in the entire game and for very brief moments that don't help the plot whatsoever anyway it's time to fight that nurse and experience the game's combat for the very first time oh no not the combat this is the game's first big problem see the developers of homecoming clearly wanted to make this an action game because the combat system is all about action you hold down the left trigger to lock into your enemy light attack with X and heavy attack with square you can also string light attacks and have the attacks and the combos with some proper timing and button input you're also able to dodge with the circle button one huge issue with this is that most enemy attacks don't have wind-up animations nor do they have any sort of sound or motion or anything to alert the player of the attack so there's no real way to anticipate attacks this makes it incredibly hard to dodge and you'll end up taking tons of hits that really shouldn't have been your fault because of this this is made even worse with the long stun times remember in Silent Hill origins how enemies have long stun periods this time the tables have turned after getting hit Alex will be left vulnerable to more attacks for a number of seconds if there's more than one enemy attacking you and you happen to get cornered that's pretty much it game over now this combat system isn't that bad if you're only facing one enemy I mean it's clearly designed for one-on-one battles since you lock onto a single target and it works okay enough for that but the second you put one more enemy in your dunzo it soon becomes a monotonous game of cat and mouse luring each enemy in the seclusion before taking it out just so you can safely advance in previous Silent Hill games if you didn't want to get hit or take damage and stay alive you didn't let the enemy anywhere near you you'd either take them out from a distance with a firearm or you timed your attack to hit them before they could get anywhere close in homecoming that combat requires getting up close in person it requires dodging and anticipating attacks and it requires skillfully carrying around your enemies and whacking away at them with attack combos and this just destroys all horror value that could possibly come from the combat it's no longer oh my god I don't want to get near that thing stay away from you stay away from you hey get back now its hail monster I'm a rush up I'm a Killa how are you gonna be afraid of enemies if you want to get close to them homecomings battle system has really made me realize if you want the player to be afraid of your enemies in the game you need to create game mechanics that make the player not want to go near them I'm gonna say this straight up sau and he'll homecoming has the worst combat system out of any sound he'll gain I'm talking games both prior and after I mean Silent Hill games in the past have always had clunky but on purpose combat to make you feel like a regular dude struggling to survive in this haunted town it had great design in both its simplicity and its ambiguity homecoming instead has very action based combat its combat that's trying to make you feel like a military badass instead of a regular person it's combat that's trying to be good and well-made and usable and accidentally becomes clunky a different kind of clunky not the clunky that made us fear the monsters in the dark and in the fog but a clunky that makes us frustrated and angry when we can't accomplish what the game wants us to because of bad controls the enemy AI is also painfully stupid you can easily trump the enemies by doing something as simple as going through a doorway I found myself using this very often to kill the enemies and when it's a common strategy in your game to abuse a flaw in the design that says a lot about the quality of your game you'd think Alex would be better at this kind of thing he is a soldier after all oh yeah that's the character thing you're a soldier in all past Silent Hill games you were always just a regular person a father a husband a teenager some dude who lives in a shabby apartment but in this game they tried to add a big character trait in the shape of their profession and what better to be in an action game Vette an army man I guess this idea has potential but it's completely wasted here you know how sahlan Hill has always been great at symbolism reinforcing the characters past look at it here hey Alex his army toys cuz he's in the army Oh in an army poster right cuz he's in the army oh did I mention he was in the army because he was in the army it's so blatant and lazy and bad anyway so after waking up from the nightmare which involved not being able to find his little brother Joshua Alex finally arrives at his hometown however the whole place seems abandoned and dilapidated and riddled with fog oh wow it's almost like we're in Silent Hill what we're not where are we once home you actually get to explore the place and solve puzzles just like any other level I like this part too exploring each room looking for regular household objects to advance with its classic Silent Hill puzzle solving like finding an oil canister going into an alley taking the gasoline out of an abandoned truck to power the generator in the basement I like the game structured kind of like the classic games namely 1 & 2 explore the town in between exploring buildings though unlike origins the levels are a lot smaller so you're never overwhelmed with a huge amount of space to explore all at once that's good because the amount of ground you had to cover in origins made the game too damned tedious that's not to say homecoming also doesn't get tedious I hope you enjoy jogging at a casual pace the entire game because homecoming completely lacks a run button your top speed just isn't very fast and it makes travelling take a lot longer than it needs to and running from enemies all more frustrating now the puzzles in the game they are really hit and miss at its best it's about finding an array of objects to use in inventive ways to advance at its worst it's a total mess take these wire puzzles for example you have to put them in the right order and then flip the switch to see if you add them in the right spot it's trial and error and it isn't difficult but moving wires over each other will also move the ones you don't want to move making it a chore to get everything where you want it there's also this sliding block puzzle near the end of the game that can just straight up go to hell took me 20 goddamn minutes to solve this thing this belongs in a professor layton game it certainly isn't something I look for in Silent Hill just like any other Silent Hill game as you progress you'll obtain a variety of weapons you'll start out with a small knife and then progress with a pipe and axe the weapons affect the combat in ways obvious enough not to require explaining but they also serve other purposes with each of these weapons you'll also be able to open certain pathways for example the knife can cut through certain obstacles pipes can pry open jammed gates and axes can chop away at boarded up doors while I do like the idea the execution of it renders each of these obstacles completely meaningless once you get each weapon you have it forever so it will never be a time where you don't have required weapon to open a door now it makes sense for the areas previously inaccessible in areas that you'll later revisit but in most cases a boarded-up door is no different than a jammed gate because you'll always have both weapons what they could have done is made it so you somehow didn't have access to all the weapons at once I'm sure they could have found a way to do it I don't know it's good on paper but there's just not enough to it in addition to melee weapons of course you get a gun though the excuse as to why you get a gun in this game is really dumb soldier's got to have a gun yes those are words a character literally says when asked why he's giving you a gun yeah okay no argument I'll take that all right aiming your firearm controls very differently as you'll actually manually aim at your target as if the game's a third-person shooter I don't know how I feel about this it does make you feel more in control and in turn it does make the gun hard to use though I suppose that's the point and I kind of like it for that I guess the shotgun on the other hand as long as you're a close-range you ain't missing your target there's also parts of the game that heavily focus on wiping out enemies with guns and again you can tell they were really trying to make this an action game I don't like this because that's not what Silent Hill is about it's about horror which homecoming completely lacks why would it be afraid of encountering enemies when my police friend is gonna wreck their [ __ ] in a matter of seconds yeah you saw that right he tore right through the thing and even when you are alone encountering enemies is more frustrating than it is scary many times I found myself getting physically angry because of dying so many times after getting stuck in an unfair stunlock or having a single enemy plowed through all of my health making me waste healing items just because of it sure the games got bloody rooms and big creepy monsters but it completely lacks the atmosphere and proper gameplay it needs for that classic Silent Hill terror a good example to compare and contrast with are the nurses in previous games they'd shake and vibrate in ways a human being physically could not it was unsettling because a human being can't physically achieve movement like that it was unnatural and that's why it was great at homecoming it just looks like they mo capped a real person telling them to twitch and be scary it looks too real like a person is just trying to act spooky for a Halloween prank or something another thing I really hate is that there's parts of the game where you're not even fighting against monsters but just dudes in hazmat suits yeah this is the only Silent Hill game where regular people are also enemies that's dumb now that's not to say that the game's monster design is completely lacking because some of these things namely the bosses do occasionally have truly terrifying designs it's just a shame that they were put into scenarios that completely lack horror you don't know anything about Silent Hill what's she talking about the developers cuz I can totally agree the only thing scary about this game is the uncanny valley the game's terrible character models occasionally entered look at this that's creepy hahaha but for all of the wrong reasons it's mostly just this one character she looks terrible she looks like a Barbie doll Alexes model looks fine in fact the whole game looks about what you'd expect from a 2008 game it's really not bad at all but the character models and animations outside of Alex and a handful of main characters really needed some work it's actually laughable how completely to visit the quality control in this game is just watch this cutscene here lip-syncing is great characters have decent animation and then suddenly there's a cut and the scene resumes in-game and the characters are suddenly animated very poorly with really really bad lip-syncing can you even call that lip-syncing their mouths are hardly even moving the voice acting is also really hidden miss overall its subpar at best but there are some moments of brilliance with some genuinely great voice acting this is a symbol of our family's past in our future I wear it you are never to show anybody this room not even Alex i watch do you remember when I told you sometimes you must do things and not ask why this is one of those times at least the game's music is great again is composed by Akira Yamaoka does a job as usual but I mean like at this point that's all I can really say about it there's so much the game just doesn't do very well but there's bits of things I like the exploration is pretty fun some the puzzles are kind of neat and I really really like the environments being given to us in frequent and short bursts and that fixes the issues that origins suffered from having not a lot of levels that were way too long instead here we have a lot of levels that are very short but the overall gameplay and the presentation are just way too clunky the combat is frustrating and the controls are sluggish and the characters just feel flat so far I'm only digging about a third of what homecoming has to offer so you got one last chance to sell me on your homecoming your story let's take a look at it okay so Alex comes home from the Army and the town's deserted and turns out people are going missing there's the cookie cutter girlfriend character and the tough black guy character and the these characters aren't interesting Alexes big character motif is that he was in the army but there's also some dumb plot twist about he was really at a mental hospital because he's crazy which by the way is the most stupid and cliche and thoughtless plot twist you could possibly put in a horror game and it doesn't even have any sort of payoff essentially Alex's father always treated Alex like crap and he treated his little brother Josh with utmost love and respect supposedly he had to make his son hate him in order to keep some curse at bay it's not explained very well at least from what I gathered maybe it wasn't paying enough attention who knows outside of those points the game's plot is just you trying to find your little brother there's a handful of moral choices you can make and they'll affect the ending you get none of the endings are very interesting though ones a generic oh the happy ending but it only really involves Alex getting out okay and that's about it then there's one where Alex becomes Pyramid Head why and then finally there's also the UFO ending nice to see them carrying on Silent Hill tradition but that's simply not enough to excuse the poor plot it's just not very good not just the story but the game as a whole sure there's like bits and pieces I like but overall the game is a clunky mess that's trying too hard to be an action game while being confined to roots it clearly doesn't want to be confined to homecoming does have a lot of great ideas but they're just not executed in ways that take advantage of their full potential the game's not terrible but it is a pretty miserable excuse of a Silent Hill game just like origins I'm gonna have to give this one a thumbs down well this certainly isn't looking very good we're only two games in in two games I already don't like but what's next on the list here Silent Hill shattered Memories who made this one climax again seriously well I guess we'll try to be a little optimistic with this one too who knows maybe they learn from their mistakes and sticking a little too close to a stale formula they really didn't understand who knows we'll find out next week when we tackle Silent Hill shattered Memories for the Nintendo Wii it's a weird that a sound Hill games on a Nintendo console but nevertheless I'll see you guys next week I hope you guys have been enjoying the sound hell marathon and hope you guys continue to enjoy this on Homer Don see you next time James had sexy nurses because his emotional backstory with the haha

Channel: Nitro Rad

Views: 616,180

Keywords: silent hill, homecoming, nitro rad, review, silent hill homecoming, ps3, xbox 360, funny, analysis, halloween, jontron, projared, game grumps, scary, horror, spooky

Id: NkKoHoIesaA

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2015