How does the combat in this series get worse over time? Actually I should start with an intro but that was my leading question while playing this 7th installment in what used to be a semi prestigious horror franchise. Downpour is the last Silent Hill to come out and now I know why. The series clearly ran its course with a lack of ideas and more importantly being stuck in the stone ages with gameplay. Kojima was probably going to rejuvenate it with totally new ideas but of course we can’t have nice things, and now team Bloober is going to probably make some crap walking sim… wait this is about Downpour sorry. It’s just almost anything is more interesting than talking about Downpour especially in 2021.
In this Silent Hill you play tortured middle aged white man #15 who is in jail for the sole purpose of getting revenge and killing the man who killed his son who is in that same prison. It starts off that way but of course the town manifests some deep hidden guilt he conveniently forgot and anyone with prior experience with this series can see the “twist” coming a mile away. So your prison transfer bus crashes right at the edge of a town called gasp Silent Hill. The usual high jinks ensues; the town is mostly deserted, the few residents there all talk in riddles and act like they are in some dream and monsters roam the streets.
So you take Murphy and run around these streets looking for clues on how to escape silent hill. While doing so you can do one of many side quests that are discoverable by exploring. Now this is the saving grace of the game and one of the reasons I don’t hate it. They actually got the running around town part down right. It’s a decent sized town to explore with oddities and side stories to discover. Some of these do lead to glorified fetch quests while others provide a cool mini story of some dead people where you must solve a puzzle of some sort. They are usually pretty involved and the puzzle themselves are better than most horror games. Like past entries there is a separate difficulty for puzzles so I put it on hard, I enjoyed them.
Roaming town is mostly just you running down foggy streets except for the occasional enemies which is where this game fails miserably. There is bad combat and then there is insulting fuck you combat, this game is the latter. These enemies will rush at you swinging, you can block but if you miss time one you are usually stuck with a combo and then your attack timing will be off so the enemy will jump back just enough for your swing to do nothing and it counter you. If you manage to get the initial smack of your whatever (knife, pole, axe, chair, you can pick up a bunch of different items) on the enemies you can usually wail on them but as I mentioned above if you miss time it now they get the upper hand. There are stun locks, weapons break at the worst times, but worst of all there is NOTHING to the combat, you just smack them over and over the same way till they fall. And then in their infinite genius there is a meta moral compass counter which determines your ending and if you execute too many of the enemies after they fall you get evil karma… if you leave them be they get up in like a minute and attack you again. Why would I not kill them?!???? Oh and there are like four types of enemies for the entire game, all boring humanoids.
Remember when Silent Hill was trying to be somewhat of a RE clone with some ammo and health management. Well in this game guns are basically pointless. You can only carry one gun but ammo for both a handgun and shotgun. So say you have a handgun and you find a shotgun, now you drop whatever melee weapon you have. Oh right there is no storing of melee weapons, you just pick up what you find and drop it. But if you have a shotgun now you can’t pick up an axe, so if an enemy comes you have to use the shotgun. So your choice is leave the shotgun behind or use it immediately until it runs out then drop it. Health packs are everywhere and thank god cause if I had to die and replay these “combat” sections I would quit. Oh but again in an amazing design choice right before the final area the game removes your entire inventory and you start over! So all those 15 health packs I saved, those 30 pistol bullets, all for nothing, woo!
Silent Hill was incredibly scary but it’s a bad shell of itself now. There are a few neat moments of mind fuckery but most of it has been done before. This game in particular doesn’t really have interesting areas nor does it use the hell version of SH in any interesting way. Anytime the hell version takes over you end up in a horrible run from the camera mini game as some random energy ball chases you. You run down bland hallways and occasionally have some obstacle you need to slow down for, not interesting or challenging in the slightest. Now in the main story building segments (of which there are only three) the game starts to bring back what made the series compelling at the start. You run around these buildings looking for keys and ways to get around while all kinds of crappy situations arise and good puzzles block your way. There is nothing as interesting as say the school in SH1 but it scratched that itch of exploring a haunted locations. The game actually isn’t terrible, if you remove the combat and some stupid design choices the skeleton of a decent silent hill game is there. It’s just all been done before and done better.
Downpour is Silent Hill running on empty and having a last gasp at a formula long since dead. Even it’s titular namesake represents a half baked idea that goes nowhere, when it randomly rains, more enemies show up… ok so just run around them… a total non factor. Not to mention there are some performance issues with really bad stutters and hiccups in the frame rate. I give it credit for the puzzles and exploration which is better than recent SH games but my god this combat serves as a detriment to everything this game could have been. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just there, a total waste of time.
Overall Score: 5.0
In this Silent Hill you play tortured middle aged white man #15 who is in jail for the sole purpose of getting revenge and killing the man who killed his son who is in that same prison. It starts off that way but of course the town manifests some deep hidden guilt he conveniently forgot and anyone with prior experience with this series can see the “twist” coming a mile away. So your prison transfer bus crashes right at the edge of a town called gasp Silent Hill. The usual high jinks ensues; the town is mostly deserted, the few residents there all talk in riddles and act like they are in some dream and monsters roam the streets.
So you take Murphy and run around these streets looking for clues on how to escape silent hill. While doing so you can do one of many side quests that are discoverable by exploring. Now this is the saving grace of the game and one of the reasons I don’t hate it. They actually got the running around town part down right. It’s a decent sized town to explore with oddities and side stories to discover. Some of these do lead to glorified fetch quests while others provide a cool mini story of some dead people where you must solve a puzzle of some sort. They are usually pretty involved and the puzzle themselves are better than most horror games. Like past entries there is a separate difficulty for puzzles so I put it on hard, I enjoyed them.
Roaming town is mostly just you running down foggy streets except for the occasional enemies which is where this game fails miserably. There is bad combat and then there is insulting fuck you combat, this game is the latter. These enemies will rush at you swinging, you can block but if you miss time one you are usually stuck with a combo and then your attack timing will be off so the enemy will jump back just enough for your swing to do nothing and it counter you. If you manage to get the initial smack of your whatever (knife, pole, axe, chair, you can pick up a bunch of different items) on the enemies you can usually wail on them but as I mentioned above if you miss time it now they get the upper hand. There are stun locks, weapons break at the worst times, but worst of all there is NOTHING to the combat, you just smack them over and over the same way till they fall. And then in their infinite genius there is a meta moral compass counter which determines your ending and if you execute too many of the enemies after they fall you get evil karma… if you leave them be they get up in like a minute and attack you again. Why would I not kill them?!???? Oh and there are like four types of enemies for the entire game, all boring humanoids.
Remember when Silent Hill was trying to be somewhat of a RE clone with some ammo and health management. Well in this game guns are basically pointless. You can only carry one gun but ammo for both a handgun and shotgun. So say you have a handgun and you find a shotgun, now you drop whatever melee weapon you have. Oh right there is no storing of melee weapons, you just pick up what you find and drop it. But if you have a shotgun now you can’t pick up an axe, so if an enemy comes you have to use the shotgun. So your choice is leave the shotgun behind or use it immediately until it runs out then drop it. Health packs are everywhere and thank god cause if I had to die and replay these “combat” sections I would quit. Oh but again in an amazing design choice right before the final area the game removes your entire inventory and you start over! So all those 15 health packs I saved, those 30 pistol bullets, all for nothing, woo!
Silent Hill was incredibly scary but it’s a bad shell of itself now. There are a few neat moments of mind fuckery but most of it has been done before. This game in particular doesn’t really have interesting areas nor does it use the hell version of SH in any interesting way. Anytime the hell version takes over you end up in a horrible run from the camera mini game as some random energy ball chases you. You run down bland hallways and occasionally have some obstacle you need to slow down for, not interesting or challenging in the slightest. Now in the main story building segments (of which there are only three) the game starts to bring back what made the series compelling at the start. You run around these buildings looking for keys and ways to get around while all kinds of crappy situations arise and good puzzles block your way. There is nothing as interesting as say the school in SH1 but it scratched that itch of exploring a haunted locations. The game actually isn’t terrible, if you remove the combat and some stupid design choices the skeleton of a decent silent hill game is there. It’s just all been done before and done better.
Downpour is Silent Hill running on empty and having a last gasp at a formula long since dead. Even it’s titular namesake represents a half baked idea that goes nowhere, when it randomly rains, more enemies show up… ok so just run around them… a total non factor. Not to mention there are some performance issues with really bad stutters and hiccups in the frame rate. I give it credit for the puzzles and exploration which is better than recent SH games but my god this combat serves as a detriment to everything this game could have been. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just there, a total waste of time.
Overall Score: 5.0