Silent Hill 3

The Good
I loved the voice acting of this game, very well executed. I also loved the sound effects of this game, very realistic and interesting. also the graphic's in this game are soo realistic, that's almost hard to separate reality and fiction in this game. I also loved the connection between this game and Silent hill part 1. Very nice connection of the two storylines here, I think the production team really put quite a bit of heart into this installment of the series.

The Bad
The challenge was a bit cheap at times, your health goes down way too quickly at times, and you die too easily.

The Bottom Line
I would describe this game as a solid installment to the Silent Hill series. However, if you are not a Silent hill fan, then I suggest that you rent this title. Some people may find some of the puzzles, and storyline of this game a bit confusing, I understood it. However, those that did not play the first Silent hill game, will find theirselves lost with this title.

The Good
From the very first moment I played the original Silent Hill, I knew that it was something special. The combination of traditional Survival Horror elements with a renewed focus on scaring the player with smartly written dialogue, intelligent camera use and a terrifying set of circumstances gave Silent Hill an edge that Resident Evil clones just didn't have. Silent Hill was a supremely negative experience, not in regards to the game but in regards to the atmosphere within it. Walls bleed and warp, disfigured enemies stagger from the shadows while your radio wails and Akira Yamaoka's masterful soundtrack pounds and shrieks in the background. It's a combination of atmosphere, soundtrack and aesthetics that helps the Silent Hill series transcend more mediocre Survival Horror pursuits.

Silent Hill 2 presented a more focused, cohesive experience with a more realized town to explore. Everything about the game was refined in relation to its predecessor. The mythology of the town was expanded upon in really subtle ways, expanding on our understanding of the underlying concepts and realities that the town was built upon, while incorporating an adeptly crafted story about a man who may or may not be suffering from a mental illness.

Silent Hill starts in a fairly unfamiliar fashion. Heather finds herself in a nightmarish Amusement Park. After escaping this nightmare she finds herself in a noticeably more mundane place; a Shopping Mall. It seems she fell asleep in a fast food restaurant. The way the game begins, with a horrible nightmare transitioning jarringly into this abject normality is part of the masterful psychological orchestration that runs through Silent Hill 3 like blood through your veins. Every meticulously crafted environment is filled with hints, mythos or elements to enhance the atmosphere. Using these elements Silent Hill 3 scares you in a decidedly unique fashion. Instead of relying on cliche's or cheap jump scares Silent Hill 3 relies solely on what your mind can compose from the elements provided for you. It's a masterpiece of mise-en-scene, with environmental details or strange creatures performing arbitrary activities while ignoring Heather augmenting the sense of dread provided by Akira Yamaoka's droning compositions. In many instances Heather seems to appear just when the horrific events have finished occurring. For instance, at one point she finds herself in a basement with a wheel chair lying on its side, the wheel slowly turning down while a trail of blood leads around the corner and into the open doors of an elevator shaft. The sense of dread accompanying this scene filled me with more fear than any pile of corpses of things jumping out of a closet ever could. The game lets your mind paint a picture and those with active imaginations will get the most out of Silent Hill 3.

Heather controls more or less like James from Silent Hill 2. The control scheme has essentially remained consistent since the original game. Holding R2 readies your weapon while pressing square while holding R2 allows Heather to guard herself from attacks. Heather quick turns, controls fluidly and using her feels like Team Silent polished the control scheme to perfection. There is not one aspect of it I can fault.

Heather's weapon choice is somewhat more varied than in previous games, with access to the obligatory handgun and shotgun in addition to more exotic things like a maul or sub-machine gun. The guard move adds a degree of strategy to fights and as usual the level of light and movement from enemies affects Heather's accuracy when firing weapons. Finishing the game while fulfilling certain secret criteria allows access to more weapons upon completion of the game. I will not ruin these for potential players however. I will say though that they are interesting, useful and balanced in their own ways, with each one requiring a level of aptitude to be used effectively.

The way Silent Hill 3 flows is significantly different from both the original and the sequel. The first half of the game is fundamentally linear, giving the feeling of a series of "dungeon" areas being sewn together with a sensible flow that adds credibility to the narrative. The second half of the game does actually take place in Silent Hill and although your exploration opportunities are limited I preferred the focused feel of this game with slight exploratory elements rather than the exploration taking precedence over exposition. There are many familiar places to explore, albeit rendered with a proficiency unlike I have ever witness on the Playstation 2.

This brings me onto the sheer amazing graphical achievements pulled off on the console. Games like God of War and Final Fantasy 12 look amazing in their own ways however they do also seem far too cartoon like. Silent Hill 3 is the only game I have ever played on the PS2 where I've felt like what I'm looking at it is real. Heather looks beautiful (in every sense of the word) and has been rendered with such meticulous detail that she looks like something that belongs in a high end Xbox game. Every single supporting character and enemy in the game exhibits this same level of astounding care from everything from the eyebrows to the lips and tiny imperfections in the skin that could have easily been left out but weren't. Environments sit molding with brooding atmosphere under amazing lighting effects and brilliant volumetric fog. Neon signs glow with a dirty vigor, casting odd shades of purple and pink over blood stained chairs and desks. Walls seem to creep with a disgusting film of moving skin and a well used church sits empty with mutlicolored light cast through stained glass windows. The world of Silent Hill 3 is amazingly organic and this sense of realism augments the sheer creeping dread felt by the player as the wander the empty hallways of the abandoned buildings and slime encrusted tunnels.

Lastly I would be doing the great composer Akira Yamaoka a disservice by not mentioning his haunting yet beautiful soundtrack. Every track that accompanies Heather's journey acts to assist in endearing ourselves to her, emphasising her youth and inexperience or her inner turmoil as she struggles to come to terms with everything she is experiencing. The soundtrack is Heather, yet it is also the environments. The soundtrack fights you as hard as the shambling monstrosities that inhabit the otherworld that Heather wanders through. It screams and shrieks and bangs and fills your head with a sense of lingering negativity and fear.

The Bad
The lack of adventuring around Silent Hill may seem like a detriment to you if you were hoping for another extended jaunt around the empty streets. Within the portion of the game where you are given relatively free reign to explore there is very little to see and do.

Some enemies are irritating, badly designed and will constantly knock you down. You might say that you could simply kill them or use beef jerky to distract them but if you are like me and take the "Survival" part of Survival Horror very seriously you will be frustrated by the constant knock downs, which Heather is very prone to, while trying to run past or avoid them.

Some characters like Douglas could have been explored with a little more depth, there is a slight revelation about his past later in the game however it is more or less totally inconsequential.

The Bottom Line
Silent Hill 3 feels almost perfect when you are playing it. It's an amazing experience, filled with such unrestricted negativity juxtaposed against the occasional tender moment of raw human emotion. Heathers journey is frightening and harrowing and yet as a gameplay experience it is fulfilling, satisfying and addictive. There are so many extra's to uncover when you have finished the game from more than 10 extra costumes, weapons and difficulty modes.

The few minor faults present in the game are overshadowed by the degree of mastery expressed by Team Silent when playing the game, which you will be playing for quite some time after you finish it.

The Good
Silent Hill 3 begins with a girl having visions of a nightmarish amusement park while she daydreams at the mall. The girl's name is Heather and waking from the dream, she's confronted by a private detective who hints that there's something mysterious about her past. Heather gives him the slip, sneaking out a bathroom window, but finds the mall has changed—stores are closed, people are gone, and strange creatures from her dream now lope down the backroom corridors. Welcome to Silent Hill.

At the start of the game, the player picks the difficulty level of the game for the combat and puzzle portions. Setting easy, medium, or hard for the combat is a pretty standard feature, but making the same adjustments for puzzle solving is a nice touch. On the easy setting, a puzzle might be absent or its solution blindingly obvious, medium requires some brainwork, and hard can be insidiously evil (but often poetic). Regardless of the settings, the game's ending is the same (at least on the first play-through).

In terms of game play, Silent Hill 3 is accessible to the newcomer, but if you haven't played the original game (or at least Silent Hill 2) the story might be elusive. Having played the original game, I still found myself reading a walkthrough of it just to clear up some of the finer story points. This, of course, would be the big difference between Silent Hill and the Resident Evil series. While Resident Evil puts you in charge of paramilitary characters, the protagonists of Silent Hill are the Lovecraftian doomed Everymen.

The opening levels in the mall set the tone for the game. In the mall, Heather runs past monsters to duck into open stores, where she finds inventory items or solves puzzles. Certain events trigger Silent Hill's signature feature—the transition into the nightmare world. When this happens, the mall's floors turn into a rusty, corrugated metal, the walls drip with blood, and more monsters appear. Now in the nightmare mall, Heather must revisit locations to find new items or explore areas which were previously closed off. It's unsettling, which is Silent Hill's second signature feature.

Following this model, Heather's adventures take her to an apartment building, an office building, and a hospital familiar to Silent Hill fans. There are also some frightening detours into the subway, the sewers, and, of course, a nightmarish amusement park. In addition to the private investigator, Heather also runs into Claudia, a cultist who also knows something about Heather's past, and Vincent, who delivers the game's most chilling line.

Silent Hill has a fare assortment of monsters: dogs whose mouths open vertically, not horizontally, giant walking cancers, and the classic mutated nurses. Heather is surprisingly well-armed against them: handgun, shotgun, katana, etc. Her best weapons, though, are the maps she finds. Heather records information about puzzles, locked doors, and the location of the many player-friendly save points. Heather's other equipment offers trade-offs: a flashlight lights the way, while drawing monsters' attention and a Kevlar vest reduces damage, but slows her down. The handheld radio returns, buzzing static when monsters are near and there are various health restoratives to be found.

I found this entry to be more engrossing than scary, which isn't to say that Silent Hill doesn’t offer more than its share of chills, but it's probably wordier and subtler than most survival horror games. Graphics are great, with cutscenes blending into game play, and the wall textures are amazing, especially the squamous ones. Voice acting is great and the music is so good the game comes with a separate soundtrack CD.

The Bad
I really enjoyed the first Silent Hill—it offered multiple endings, most of which were bleak, placed you in confrontation with allies, and told a very disturbing story very effectively. I liked this game but found it lacking in several ways.

Silent Hill 3 has monsters you've never seen before and some of them just look silly. There are bizarre tripod things, weird bipedal creatures that look like miniature, headless ostriches, and one of the bosses screams phallic image. Not that these things aren't dangerous, but… really? I also don't understand why the monsters of Silent Hill change from game to game.

So some of the monsters are silly but dangerous, thankfully, Heather's well-armed. Too well-armed and too proficient with the arms she has. When's the last time you found a katana? Close quarters, in the dark, with monsters all around—how accurate are you with a gun? How fast can you reload it under those circumstances? It's amazing how collected Heather is, but it's astounding what she actually reacts to. After fighting the phallic image, Heather finds a newspaper rack with papers a few months old. That freaks her out. The worm didn't.

The Bottom Line
As I was playing this, Silent Hill 4: The Room was released. At this point, I'd like to see some of the mysteries of Silent Hill cleared up, rather than new installments taking place in its surrounding areas. I'm not saying that I wouldn't like to see more games, but perhaps they could be set in earlier times. I'd like to see a story arc, instead of sequelization.

Having said that, Silent Hill 3 is a very good game that fails to kick up the genre or the franchise.