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Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

aka: Silent Hill 2: Director's Cut, Silent Hill 2: Inner Fears, Silent Hill 2: Saigo no Uta
Moby ID: 5069

Windows version

A terribly done adventure game

The Good
May be it is a great adventure. May be it is scary. May be it has atmosphere. May be it has a good story. I don't know about that, because I was too frustrated with the game to notice all this.

The Bad
Controls are terrible. I don't care that it was ported from game consoles. In 2002 developers no longer have an excuse not to make decent controls for the game. You press the attack key, but nothing happens because the game didn't finish the character animation yet. The fighting system in general is crap. Every 5-20 seconds game pauses for a fraction of a second without apparent reason (no disk activity, no transition to another scene and my 3D hardware is more than adequate). The sounds are supposed to be scary, but they are annoying an low quality. The graphics look pathetic. The noise feature is probably intended to make the image similar to the crappy picture that console users had on TV and it succeeds briliantly. It does look crappy. And you are not going to see farther than 5 meters from your nose. Yeah, it's a fog, I know, but it doesn't make the game look better.

The story might be great, but things like broken lip sync for cut scenes spoil it. Having to spend some considerable time in the beginning in the fog fighting some generic annoying zombies (same model, 30 identical copies running around) doesn't improve the first impression.

The Bottom Line
If you like adventures and are not afraid of disappointment, you might give it a try. Who knows, may be you will like this game better than I did.

by Paranoid Opressor (181) on March 21, 2003

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