With Silent Hill's main story arc having been concluded in Silent Hill 3, you just know the succeeding games won't be having that same climactic feel to them anymore. That was true for Silent Hill 4, and while the same goes for Silent Hill 5, it still manages to stand out on its own, giving out an amply dark and eerie story, and a good mix of visceral combat and mystery puzzle-solving like any decent survival horror game.

This game centers on Alex Shepherd. Just having been expelled from military service, he finds himself returning to his hometown of Shepherd's Glen. Finding out that his father and younger brother is missing, he sets out to find them, inevitably leading himself down to the fog-ridden, demented town of Silent Hill. I won't delve too much on the story details-- in fact, I'll stop right now, 'cause I clearly don't want to spoil anything for the players.


One thing I will say about this Silent Hill though, its different. This game was developed by North Americans, and you know just by that, right there, it means a whole lot of difference. Yeah, Konami's Team Silent did a pass on this one, taking it to the relatively new, yet capable, Double Helix Games to create the fifth for the series, and it really shows right from the very start of the game.


In the PC version (it has a PC version), you can opt to use the keyboard and mouse, and the controls will feel like your usual third-person shooter game. In fact, it uses a third-person camera style. In more fact, when you equip a gun and shoot, it switches to a first-person camera mode. The game really eschews the cinematic-camera style used by Japanese games in favor of letting the player control where the view points to (North Americans like their freedom very much). The cinematic camera views are now pretty much reserved only for cut-scenes.

Personally, I would have preferred the cinematic-style, with the game being a survival-horror, it would have strengthened the horror part (and it would have made searching for objects in a room a bit easier[1]), but playing through it, you'll easily get used to the third-person view soon enough.


The next difference is that, this being a next-gen game and all, the graphics are considerably way better than the previous games in the series. This also means, if you use a PC, you will need a pretty beefed up PC to play this decently. At the very least, this game requires a dual-core proccessor, a fairly recent video card, and lots of RAM[2]. This game also noticably uses the Havok physics engine (as reported by the fine print) so you're sure to have some superficial debris, chairs and whatnot that will fall and bump realistically, albeit exaggeratingly, as I experienced it-- the merest bump on an object will send it tumbling noisily on the floor (clearly Alex has no sense of subtlety).


The game also makes use of "Quick Time Events": these are moments where you need to rapidly tap a particular button, usually on emergency situations where you need to escape an overpowering enemy, or something to that effect. Its annoying at times (it makes your finger sore, for one thing), and sometimes it helps make you pump more of that adrenaline to your state of mind during those panic-ridden moments, it helps give more of that scary feel.


There are lots of subtle, minor improvements too: the main character's animations are noticably more fluent[3], whether it be looking from left to right, climbing ladders, or doing melee atttacks. Descriptions that appear when investigating objects don't forcefully pause the game, like it used to. And, it having third-person controls and all, moving the main character doesn't feel like driving a car anymore.


Now the combat is drastically improved, and I personally find it a lot more enjoyable this time. Taking from Silent Hill 4, your character can do two types of melee attacks: quick and light strikes that can be done successively, and slow, fierce attacks where you can hold down the button to charge it up for more damage.

Now adding to that, first, you can do combo attacks by doing a succession of two or three quick attacks, then follow it up with one heavy attack as a finisher. You need to press the attack buttons in the right timing to do these combo attacks, and those timings vary from one weapon to another.

Second, you now have a dodge button that can be used to deflect enemy melee attacks, and when you time it right, pressing any attack button after dodging will make a counterattack.


Unlike the previous Silent Hill protagonists, our Alex here is actually an ex-military soldier (and a Special Forces soldier at that), so you could pretty much say that this guy knows his way around weapons. Fighting a zombie nurse one-on-one with just a combat knife will be a piece of cake for you (although having two of them ganging up on you is a different story).

If you think that dampened the scare-value of the game, you'll be relieved to know that there are still lots of frightful moments, and enemies are just as capable as the main character. They all have nasty tricks up their sleeves (except for the zombie nurse, unless you count her erotic physique as a diversionary tactic). Some enemies can knock you down on the ground with a powerful lunge attack (that is also the time when you may start panicking). You can avoid that by not being there in the first place, or pressing the dodge button at the right moment.


You can pretty much even do stealth, surprise attacks. Its not that there's a stealth button or anything, its just that you can pretty much stage an ambush on unsuspecting enemies (you practically move silently when you're in the combat stance, and adding to that, hold the walk button, and you move even slower and more quiet). Its quite a simple but very helpful feature.


The only thing I could have been griping about was that there was no quick in-game tutorial for the combat controls. There was a quick in-game explanation on how to turn on your flashlight, there was an in-game explanation about the noise your radio makes, but nothing on how to do the combat stance. Since I've been playing Silent Hill games for so long I pretty much know the formula, but I imagine new-time players will be getting frustrated on their first combat encounter. A quick look at the main menu's controls config will aid first-time players.


This game has its fair share of bugs: I've experienced NPCs who are supposed to follow you getting stuck on walls, enemies that suddenly dissappear. There was even one time wherein my fight with a spider-like monster just stopped. It didn't hang, the two of us just stared at each other indefinitely. There aren't any patches out yet at the time of this writing, so it means I'll just have to wait.


Silent Hill 5 is a good game all things considered. Long time fans of Silent Hill will enjoy this game for all its worth, even if they'll surely feel a slight disorientation with the new direction the new game is pushing the series to. Any survival horror game enthusiast worth his salt would do well to at least try this game out.

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[1] This is also most likely the reason why the developers opted to make objects in the game glow unrealistically; to aid players in discerning which items can be picked up.

[2] I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Brisbane, an Inno3D NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS, and 3 GB of DDR2 RAM at 250 MHz, and even in 640x480 resolution, my game runs on the measly 20-30 fps limit, and occasionally slowing down and skipping, most likely because the game is loading something in the background. I have a feeling one of the reasons is because I only use a built-in soundcard.

[3] Remember Silent Hill 3 when Heather walks through a flight of stairs? It really makes me go "Excuse me, wtf are you doing?" Silent Hill 4 remedied that, and its good to see that Silent Hill 5 improves it even further.