Silent Hill Homecoming If the Silent Hill series ended on the third part, it would be legendary by now. Unfortunately, in the gaming industry it is such that the cow is milked with sweat, this can be stopped and the victim of just such treatment is a series about the cursed city. Since the release not very successful part of the fourth Silent Hill rolls down a slippery slope, and in the meantime created quite decently, given the low standards of the genre, the film adaptation is another part of which has already attracted great interest especially the fans and the media. It's hard not to resist the impression that The Room and its origins are the series' only splashes, and the focus has shifted from the games to filming. Homecoming, which is the fifth part of Silent Hill, is released in Europe with a delay of almost five months in relation to the US issue. Double Helix, the company responsible for the game's production, they had so much time to better refine the title. Most importantly, however, there is a question of whether the series returns to the main track and how it compares to other survival horror productions presented. If anyone was hoping for a fresh start, as was the case with the Resident Evil series and the fourth part, is sorely disappointed. Homecoming is a typical representative of survival horror, the delusion reminiscent of what we saw in the first part of ten years ago. Third-person view, flashlight, melee weapons and weapons, bosses and locations that we have visited or passed in the previous sections. Luckily, the fifth section contains some innovations that improve the gameplay a bit.
Playing Homecoming for PC, we can choose between the pillow or a combination of mouse and keyboard. This second option shows its advantages especially when shooting with a firearm when first-person mode is activated. If we decide on the first option, we must prepare an unpleasant surprise. Double Helix decided to do so despite the owners of waste from the Xbox 360 and redirects all the buttons in a way completely different from the standard A, B, X, Y. We don't know what's going on here because it is certainly not about money. As a result, when a monster strangles our hero, and information from the pulsing red button appears on the screen - intuitively press the red pad B, which of course ends with Alexa going down. It's hard to get used to, because determining buttons by their position on the Xbox 360 pad is a convenient standard in PC games. The structure of the game is similar to what we have seen in the previous parts of the series. Moving linearly from place to place, we find the map and wander through the corridors of the next closed door, for those who search that can be opened. We take care of the amount of ammo and first aid kits, encounter monsters kill and solve puzzles to finally reach a peak to a certain level. Luckily, same puzzles stand up pretty well, like this kind, level. I have to admit that Double Helix does its job very well here, and this element of the game is properly balanced. We won't find any game of puzzles in that is an affront to the intelligence of the players, which was not uncommon in the earlier installments of the series. The plot is also beautiful, strongly connected with severe depression of our hero, making it close to the second part of the cycle. But it has no such power or weight as in Silent Hill 2 and Alex, although a hundred times more interesting than tirowiec Travis Henry is the origins of the room is not as convincing as James. Fans of the series will likely find that Homecoming has been "upgraded" to what we see in the film. Without revealing anything about the story and the sites we will visit, it is worth noting that the characteristic transition to another hellish side of reality - when you see loosening pieces of wallpaper - has been faithfully transmitted to the game. Story told by Homecoming but lacks that uniqueness that would make it more than just one of many stories giving the same feeling it's really just a spin-off that cycle doesn't bring everything important.
CPU: Dual core CPU such as Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
RAM: 1 GB (XP) or 2 GB (Vista)
OS: Windows XP / Vista
GPU: DirectX 9.0c compliant video card such as ATI Radeon HD-series graphics card (minimum 256 MB) or NVIDIA GeForce 7800-series graphics card (minimum 256 MB)
HDD: 10 GB
Silent Hill Homecoming is one of the few horror series that has really made a good reputation. The first two parts, apart from an excellent plot, also had carefully selected puzzles and defined this genre on their consoles. At the same time, the Konami series has always stood in opposition to Resident Evil, which primarily contained action and atmosphere closer to the films of Dario Argento. With the 3rd and 4th parts of Silent Hill, the authors got a bit confused, and although they created solid items, fans of the series were not particularly thrilled. Homecoming, as the title suggests, is meant to be a return to basics. But is the implementation of ideas from before the 2nd generation working nowadays?
Silent Hill Homecoming Already in the introduction, I basically touched on the biggest flaw of this game, which appears through its individual elements and does not allow us to say that SH: Homecoming is an excellent game. Wait a minute, stop, the return to the beginnings, to the first Silent Hill, is what we expected. Sure, it may seem so to us, but here our imagination and memory holes add up to this and that, and it seems to us that it used to be great, and then not very much. Well, Homecoming is a vivid example that duplicating the way of gameplay from years ago is not necessarily the best idea. And after the atmospheric intro, which I wrote about in the first impressions, we feel like we were seated in front of PSone. View from 3 people, firearms and melee weapons, opponents scattered here and there, overwhelming fog ... I could do that for a long time, really.
Silent Hill Homecoming The way of presenting the story is also not the most ambitious - just by the thread to the ball. At the beginning we know nothing, or very little, and only at the end we learn what it was all about. In addition, we learn most of the facts about the places we are in from all kinds of notes, diaries, etc. Maybe it is credible that people leave a piece of paper on the table with a few sentences written on it, while I expect a bit more from the current generation. Even more so, if these are revealing messages, such as - it is terrible in this prison, they do not feed us and, in addition, torture us - I am able to guess it myself by looking at the gore on the walls and the psychopathic guards.
