My mixed feelings on Silent Hill Downpour, it’s got some good, some bad, and some that just should have been fixed.
Silent Hill – Downpour
My mixed feelings on Silent Hill Downpour, it’s got some good, some bad, and some that just should have been fixed.
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First!!!
Another great Review Phelous!
WTF happened with the Silent Hill series??? Did they changed the Developer Team? Since “the Room” the whole Franchise gets more and more mainstream. I miss the claustrophobic and dark style of the first 3 games (especially the first on the PSX, love this game!!!)
Anyway, keep it up!
The Room had a different philosophy behind its development than the first three. After The Room, the development team (Team Silent) split up and developers in the US took over.
And congrats on getting the “first”. It must be a big achievement for you.
Atleast the guy was making a relevant comment with a little substance to it, rather than just a lone and impotent “First!”.
They’re the ones that get my goat.
In every Silent Hill review you’ve done, you’ve had the same ending credit music everytime. Who did it and what is it called? I’ve tried to look for it but nothing comes to mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdM15-GdHyc you’re welcome, brah
I actually clicked “continue” and the video instantly continued, yay for pointlessness ^^
I only have Silent hill: Shattered Memories and Silent Hill Origins but this… what is this I don’t even?
At 16:50 Phelan’s Silent Hill 4 boxs slides down a bit… IT’S THE OTHER WORLD!!!
Yeah. I saw that as well. It did it a few other times in this video too.
The Room must be demanding a video of its own, what was once the most hated of Silent Hills.
I cannot wait to get back from class to watch this! Thanks for a monday treat, phel.
Could someone please tell me what song is playing at the end of the video and who composed it? I remember hearing it from another Phelous review (Silent Hill, I gather) and it has been bugging me since then.
It’s Hometown from Silent Hill 3.
Thhhhhaaanksssssss Pheeeeelous 😉
I can safely say it was a really great review. It’s really sad to see the games go more and more “mainstream-ish” and fumbling the mechanics, over and over and over again. And i’m not much happier to hear the HD collections was apparently not very good. Apparenlty, the Re-recorded voice acting for the third game is your only option, but at least you have a choice between Original or Redone VAs for the second..another bad thing was that there’s far less fog, and the water textures are horrid.
Will you being reviewing this too, Phelous? :O
I liked it, but I’m trained to shut off my brain when I play games. Also, I figure that the original concept of Silent Hill monsters were retconned a long time ago, even though none of the fans aprove of it. But my favorite thing about the game is really just the landscape design.
Heheh, my roommate walked in during the part where you were screaming & running in a circle, & she’s like “what the hell are you watching?”
Honest and fair review Phelous please review House of 1000 Corpses I guess I’m the only one who hated it 🙁
Thank you Phelous.
You know, it’s funny. Even though you pretty much said the game is a mixed bag, your review actually convinced me to buy this thing, whereas I wasn’t sure before I saw it. The thing is, from what you’ve shown in this review, the good seems to overweigh the bad. The game generally seems closer to the original games (as in, the ones developped by Konami), certainly more so than Homecoming, and the gameplay looks decent aside from a few hiccups here and there.
There ARE a few things I’m not happy to see such as the long load times, the lag, the red orb thing (“let’s take hints from the most annoying part of SH3!”) and of course, why the current developpers keep insisting that breakable weapons are either necessarry, fun, or realistic (yeah, let’s make weapons break at the slightest provocation for added “realism” but still allow the player to carry a concession stand worth amount of items), but it looks like stuff I can get past and wouldn’t really get annoyed by.
Also, while I agree stuff like the zombie police car, the DJ condemned to, er, DJ for all eternity and the monsters calling him really shouldn’t be in a Silent Hill game (or at least not as some sort of “wacky mode” you unlock after beating the game or something), well… it’s the kind of silly bullshit I can get behind, so I don’t really mind either.
So yeah, thanks for an actually helpful review, Phelous, those are getting rare these days, I’m definitely going to buy this game as soon as I ca-FFFUUUUUU I don’t have a PS3 or XBOX 360. Well, here’s hoping for a PC or PS VITA port.
Okay that’s pretty funny; leave a pretty big blurb on buying/playing the game… only to realize at the very end of your novel that you can’t even play the game cause you lack the console! XD
Pretty disappointing. How’d the soundtrack turn out, I was admittedly not paying terribly much attention to that so forgive me if you mentioned it. The composer also did the score for Dexter, IIRC.
I guess its always been the staple, to my knowledge, that the monsters in silent hill reflect the turmoil of the character. Has this been retconned since The Room?
My main beef with this game is…well…to me its actually kinda boring. It looks nice but it’s not at all scary. Accept for a couple of moments that weirded me out.
-Auto Saving. I hate it. When used in survival horror it makes me feel like the game is taking pity on me. When I don’t even need that pity.
– The Screamer is okay simply because she isn’t a big breasted nurse. But most of these monsters just look like zombies. Nothing seems strange or mutated or abstract. They just look like zombies.
– The red vortex of doom is annoying, not because it exists, but because sometimes I have no clue where to turn, and I’d often find myself running back onto it and loosing health and hearing the guy scream pathetically.
– I think the mail man dude is a ghost with some retconned history behind him. But why did the writers create the DJ only for him to vanish mere minutes after you see him? Why was he in Silent Hill? How long had he been there? If he wanted to use the radio station to call for help then…why not just do that instead of DJing? If the town was smart enough to know that he was trying to cryptically call for help the whole time it sure did wait a while to take him out. And why, when the monsters attacked the studio, did they grab everyone except Murphy?
Even stranger is the fact that he knew who Murphy was when that’s impossible. None of this is explained. Its like the dev team wanted to create a Eddy or an Angela type character but had utter brain farts and just failed completely.
This might sound weird but I kinda blame the lack of scariness in this game on the technology of today. The fog existed to hide bad draw distance issues. Now there is no need for fog. Everything is clear and you can see miles in the distance. Back in the day when poly count was low and you could only vaugely tell what something was, and let your brain fill in the blanks. That was true terror.
what’s with the wardrobe change? i think you really DID get sucked into the Other World
so it’s not the SH game we been waiting for it but it another step to the right direction like Shatered Memories was? I don’t know.. (I didn’t play the game relaly, I’m still watching reviews and LP, I might skip it)
I’m glade at least that the story was good, but I guess it wasn’t enough to save it.
I have to admit that while I do like the idea about the SH monsters representing the minds of the characters, I always thought that the actual connection has been tenuous in many of the games. Monsters like the Insane Cancer and the Pendulum in SH3 I always thought never had any real symbolic value to them and alot of the time the creators really stretch logic to try to get that symbolism in there. So while I admit that the new games have rather vague monsters, I dont think the old games can be entirely forgiven. The ghost police car I think could have been made scary by simply having it drive around and activate its siren when it sees you to act as a beacon for monsters to follow rather than releasing monsters itself. The void is an impressive visual but I agree that it doens’t make much symbolic sense. The rest of the monsters are fairly unremarkable although I do appreciate that they created a unique pursuer in the Boogeyman without resorting to using Pyramid Head again.
I sincerely love Phelous and its reviews. Can’t find more profound opinions anywhere) And, BTW, thanks for this video review, it’s brilliant as always! Who doubted?
convert mov to avi
Awesome review as always Phelous! Your work and Lupa’s always makes me laugh. Do you think you and Lupa will ever do a Let’s Play of one of Silent Hill games?
lol phelous i always wondered what is your favorite ufo ending? the funiest i think is origins and shattered memories… the best i think is the 1st one though 🙂
oh shit its the tree from anaconda 4! if johnny cage couldn’t get by it nothing can, especially the mighty murph
Although I do agree with you that the monster designs in the game are dull, they actually do symbolize Murphy’s inner demons.
The screaming women represent Murphy’s ex-wife, Carol. A note you find in the game suggested they had a troubled relationship, possibly even before their son is killed. And if you look at the picture you unlock of her in the extras, she looks almost like the screaming women enemies in the game.
All of the prisoner enemies obviously represent Murphy’s natural fears of possibly being shanked or raped by the other inmates during his time in prison.
The “dolls” most likely represent a sex doll Murphy used when he couldn’t get any from his wife, possibly due to their strained relationship. I’m basing this on the cut-scene where Murphy finds one of the doll enemies sitting in a chair, looking a lot like a sex doll. We all know how the Silent Hill series loves to throw in a little sexual repression with their characters.
I assumed the red light that chases him is probably a physical manifestation of his most horrible memories. All through the game, Murphy keeps denying he remembers anything. Most likely his way of coping. So I guess the idea of him remembering will probably kill what’s left of him. So he’s pretty much forced to run away from the red light or die.
Lastly, the sledgehammer Pyramid Head wanna-be is symbolizing the “monster” that took away both Murphy and Cunnigham’s loved ones, or how they perceive those killers in their mind’s eye. And the wheel-chair monster being Cunnigham’s father of course. The game obviously has Murphy running through Cunnigham’s version of the Otherworld sometimes, while he’s still forced to face off some of his own demons as well. Which is something they established can happen with characters from time to time in Silent Hill 2.
Phelous, to be fair, taking a swim in very cold water is a very BAD idea…
Although the protagonist of SH:Downpour could have chosen other, much more logical routes than going through mines… (which is usually also a very bad idea in real life)