Downpour's greatest strength is the ability to explore Silent Hill to the point of uncovering an impressive number of side quests that are probably more compelling than the redemptive grieving-father-cum-vengeful-prisoner story.

The design of the town is much more fully realised than Homecoming, allowing you to enter various interesting new locations, most notably, for me, a cinema showing a mysterious film you can walk into (pretty weird).
The game still has a number of lows, most notably the silly crazy ghost train adventure in the ol' mines. Some of the supporting characters also feel incredibly plain, such as postman guy.
Subtlety is long gone by this point, and unfortunately the one thing this game is not is scary. But at least it's also not Homecoming!

this game is... really interesting. there's so so much i love about it but also so much bad. but the bad feels almost... intentional? as in, the game is boring and tedious; but it almost feels like its supposed to be that way. it feels like its supposed to be frustrating to play. the controls are another thing - tank controls are absolutely amazing for the silent hill series and there's no option for them in this game. and despite this game coming out after silent hill 3, it doesnt look nearly as good from a graphical and animation standpoint. i want to finish this so bad but the entire second half becomes an escort mission through all the areas previously visited and... i just couldnt take it anymore. i may come back and finish this at some point and even bump up my rating if i feel it deserves it, but for now - i cant bring myself to play any more.

A decently enjoyable spooky romp. I got very tense at points, even if the game is never all that scary. It is an almost 15 year old game, and it shows its age sometimes. It looks about as good as you could expect from 2005, the combat is satisfying if janky at times, with weapons sometimes landing a hit when it feels out of reach and vice versa, but hitting the face of some poor bastard with a sledgehammer and it making a shower of blood and broken teeth is quite rewarding. I am particularly fond of the voice acting, with the game only having a grand total of 4 voice actors, with everyone except for Thomas' VA making a titanic amount of random enemy and other character voices, as well as sfx. It just amazes me how flexible the voice actors were. I should try the sequel, even though I heard it isn't as good as this one

Quite possibly the greatest game of all time. Does nothing but perfect everything about the original even further. Nothing else comes close to the absolute kinography that is The King of Cosmos's backstory, the mind bending shibuya-kei OST, the incredible realistic graphics Crysis can't even dream of replicating, and of course, the level where you roll a sumo guy so that he can eat enough food to get big enough to knock the other guy out. Not even the notorious cowbear level is enough to knock anything off of this literal perfect game.

All in all yea its alright i guess