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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What else can I say but, WOW!, December 7, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
I don't really even know where to begin on this game. This was the very first game I ever played on PS2 several years ago. But, at the time, I got really frustrated with it and said I didn't like it. However, when I purchased my own PS2, I decided it was time to give this game another try. And, I really don't believe I could have been anymore wrong about the game then I was years back. This game was so captivating that it held my interest and my fear through every move in the game. Truly terrifying, I couldn't fall asleep for awhile after playing this game. It will truly scare the hell out of you if you play it alone in the dark.
But, overall, the story held together so well, it was like you were reading a piece of literature. And it truly should be placed on the same level as literature from the beauty it conveys. I am greatly looking forward to investing more time in this game to play it through again.
I will make you a solid gurantee that you will never be disappointed with this game. Silent Hill 2 is looking for your time and I can gurantee you that you will not regret investing time in this incredible game!
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hauntingly detailed, mentally unsettling, but just a bit too short..., September 22, 2006
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
My initial fears that this was just an overhyped Resident Evil clone were quickly put to rest - although the two games share a genre and pieces of a control scheme, their personalities couldn't be further apart. Where the first three Resident Evils focused on the cheesier, blood-n-guts style with a hint of puzzle solving in the name of variety, Silent Hill 2 concentrates much more on the unknown, the unexplained and the psychologically disturbing. Where Resident Evil 2 is horror in the vein of Dawn of the Dead, Silent Hill 2 is more along the lines of The Ring or The Shining.
It's that establishment of potential horror, not the actual moments of battle where the monster lies revealed, that are most successful in Silent Hill and, honestly, in most of the better films within the genre. To say that this game is lacking in real scary moments would be both unfair and untrue... I jumped more times than I'm comfortable to admit while playing through this one in the dark... but it properly uses such moments as an accent, rather than a crutch. It's been said that the most horrific monster in the world can never be captured on film, because it resides within the collective imaginations of the audience. Hollywood can never frighten you as badly as you can frighten yourself. It's this kind of mentality that I see reflected in Silent Hill 2 from the very get-go. Sure, they do eventually show you the monsters, and they're significantly horrific on their own, but they're all little more than pawns in this scheme, even the bosses. They're just around to nudge your mind in the right direction, so that the little shadows you'll catch darting around at the edge of your field of vision can be more effective and more relative to the story.
In terms of atmosphere, there's very little that this game does wrong. It's learned all the right lessons from the progression and evolution of cinematic horror and applied them to the incomparably personal experience of a quality video game. It's established a unique style, a great cluster of settings, and a wonderful premise (the lead character, James, receives a letter from his wife three years after her death, pleading with him to visit the town of Silent Hill) but the actual follow-through of the story and the accompanying character interactions are lacking. This reminds me of Eternal Darkness in a way, in that a lot of the strange occurrences and developments seem completely random and are never connected to the story itself. Almost universally, the cast is detached from reality, lacking in personality and in emotion, which works within the confines of the plot but results in the player never being fully drawn into the game's world.
I came away from this game feeling as though I'd read a short story that had been padded out and enlongated thanks to the inclusion of a dozen different unrelated asides. It's a fifty page story stretched over the course of a three hundred page novel. You'll meet five non-playable centric characters around the city, but only two of them have a real bearing on the plot, which is itself little more than a series of vague insinuations. It's a real shame, too, because all of the pieces have been set in the right place to accommodate for a much more striking, intriguing tale.
Controlling James as he explores the city is fairly easy, if not entirely ideal. Several elements of the Resident Evil control scheme have surfaced with Silent Hill 2's configuration, most notably the "boat steering" movement controls. If you didn't like standing in one place, pivoting and then running directly forward or backward in Capcom's zombie-fest, you aren't going to like it here. Personally, I've grown used to it and the steering doesn't seem to get in my way any more, but I can certainly see why some players would have developed a bitter hatred for it. One thing that differs from Resident Evil's traditional setup, however, is a fully polygonal environment and a free-roaming camera. What that means is less cheap scares and monsters hiding in plain sight, and a much more interactive experience.
I'll come right out and admit to savoring every last bit of the visual direction and graphical representations of Silent Hill 2. If there's one area that this game absolutely nails, it's this: everything from the character designs to the environments to the simple, yet undeniably successful, film grain texture that overlays every moment of gameplay... it's all an unbridled success. This is among the most thought-out, fully realized visual productions I've ever seen in a game, and even the hardware limitations of the original Xbox are addressed in a concise, effective manner that works within the confines of the big picture. The dreamlike state of your visit to the town explains away the boundaries around the playable area... you don't run into an invisible wall, there are just mysterious tarps or bottomless pits sealing off certain parts of town. You'll accept it at face value because, hey, you just fired three rounds into a set of animated mannequin legs.
Another noteworthy visual innovation is the complete lack of any kind of heads-up display or on-screen indicator. With the multitude of potential actions and inventory items that seem to have completely overtaken the industry, it's a nice change of pace to see a game with just a character and an environment on the screen at any given time. It not only keeps the playing field open for some of the more subtle effects, but also makes the experience even more akin to that of watching a movie.
The appearance of the monsters remains among the most successfully frightening I've ever seen. It's easy to throw sharp teeth, bumpy skin and red eyes onto something, call it an enemy and commence with the cheap scares. What's not so easy is introducing a baddie that's horrifying if just because you have no idea what in the living hell it really is. The bad guys of SH2 are, obviously, the latter. They don't always look so much like they're attacking you out of anger, so much as they're lashing out because they're constantly in pain and see anything that moves as a possible cause. I almost felt pity for these things, their existence is so pitiful, so filled with tragedy.
I can't rightfully discuss the visuals of this game without giving some love to the incredible lighting effects, either. I'd truthfully rank this game ahead of the original Splinter Cell in that category, and Sam Fisher's first romp was released almost specifically to show off everything the Xbox could do in that respect. In Silent Hill 2, you travel the entire city with just a flashlight, which (needless to say) is handled magnificently. Everywhere you go, that single light source is playing with your surroundings to cast all sorts of bizarre, frightening, downright malicious shadows throughout the room
I adored the majority of my experience with Silent Hill 2. The story, while thin at times, is generally workable and never really insultingly self-indulgent. The length of the game bothered me a bit, as the main game map is quite elaborate and seemed to have a lot of unrealized potential, but that goes back to the weakness of the basic plot and the lack of any major side stories of consequence. If you've got a weekend to kill and want to be emotionally shaken, this is exactly the game for you. It features one of the best all-around identities in the history of the industry, takes dozens of hints from the lessons learned by its predecessors in film, and is truly horrifying on several levels. If the story had been a little thicker and the cast had been fleshed out a little further, this would've been close to perfect.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I've lost track of how many times I've played through this game!!!, October 20, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
This game is one of the best games I've ever played, it is such an incredible follow-up to Silent Hill 1, which is also a 5/5 star game. This game is a psychological roller coaster ride, which won't be for everyone, although many people like it even if they don't seem to understand the goings on in this game. Don't get me wrong, I don't want it to sound like I think I'm so much smarter than anyone, but you gotta admit that this game might be a little much for some people to comprehend. There is so much symbolism and so many little things that means something incredible. No one person could solve every piece of information this game gives you. The more you play the game the more you realize things that you didn't see the first time, wierd pictures, clippings, things like that. And lots of visual things. This game requires you to think about everything that's going on in order for you to understand everything it has to offer. For example, every monster in the game represents something about James and his past, except for one or two that has to do with other characters like Angela.
This game is also incredible because the general reason for there to be people there. You find out that everyone there who sees monsters and who don't completely understand why they're there have commit a certain atrocity. That's all I'm saying. So that does explain why everyone who's there seems to have extreme emotional disturbances. This game is definitely very grim and won't make you happy to play it, but it is incredibly moving and sad. This game does have one downside I'll admit, it didn't scare me hardly at all, I felt moved and sad because of incredible story, but it didn't scare me though. They tried to make you psychologically freaked out, and some people will be, but I personally wasn't, this isn't a big deal though. Oh and did I mention all the endings, there're 6 total on the Greatest Hits Version.
Okay, for technical things. The graphics don't bother me in the slightest so I don't understand why anyone would lower their opinion about this game cause of that. I love the voice actors for the most part. James does have a few incredibly weak lines, but otherwise the dialogue is good too. The game works perfectly fine when it comes to running, battling, using items, etc...
Overall this is one of the best games out there. I don't think I'd have done a thing different to this game. It's one of the most sophisticated, brilliant video games I've ever played.
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