Usually when you take a franchise 10 years in the making and ship it to another company for development, you would normally expect it to go completely tits-up. If the current footage available is anything to go by, then Silent Hill is coming back scarier, freakier and better than ever.
From the looks of some of the scenes the game has been inspired by the movie. A few scenes of note are in the game. You can also tell that Studio 9 (developers for Street Fighter 2 HD, Bomberman Live and Monster Lab) seem to be bringing that psychological terror back from the second game. Something that Silent has missed.
Combat has been beefed up and this wasn’t a strong point in any of the previous installments. Silent Hill will hit hard with a wider range of attacks, combos and grapples. To counter this the AI has been enhanced to still give the player a sense of vulnerability. The game also comes packing, with a new physics engine that will make the environment around you more realistic. If you bump into a table not only the table moves but so everything on it. This heightens the tension and makes you watch your step more, as not to alert nearby creatures.
On the subject of creatures the game will retain some of the old monsters such as the nurses (hopefully red pyramid) but new creatures Siam and Schism, humanoids with a massive, bladed head split down the middle, and Smog, an emaciated corpse who spews out toxic gas.
Players of the previous titles will know that the sound makes all the difference to this, Akira Yamaoka is working his mastery on the games soundtrack and lets be honest it wouldn’t ‘feel’ like Silent Hill without him. In a recent interview he said that “Its a new game, with a new feeling, So we want to bring a new sound to it.”
Konami are building this title up quite a bit with the name alone. Hopefully it will breath some life into this series and it will be worth of its name. I’m fairly confident that come late 2008, Silent Hill 5 will breathe life back into scaring the hell out of yourself. It’s looking very promising from what we’ve seen so far.
Leave a Reply