Silent Hill : Downpour brings some new modifications in the Silent Hill series. This is the eight installment of the series developed by Vatra Games and published by Konami Digital Entertainment. It was released on Mar 13, 2012 on X360 and PS3.
As the name suggests Downpour, it is indeed a game where rain is frequently pouring down from the sky bringing all sorts of hell with it. If you want to be safe, keep on surviving and exploring the vast town of Silent Hill then you have to do one thing and one thing only that is to immediately take shelter inside some old building, house or room else…the monsters will become more hostile and will attack you in groups as downpour spawns them incessantly.
The game introduces Murphy Pendleton,protagonist as a prisoner of Ryall State Prison, and the whole game revolves around him making efforts to find his way out of the ghost town, fighting dreadful monsters hungry for his soul and making morality choices resulting in unravelling more facts to escape out of the horror lurking in Silent Hill.
There were two things that I loved very much in this game, one was a place inside a house with complete darkness not a single glow of light from anywhere but something is there with you and no matter how brave you are you will shiver from head to toe, this I guarantee…(Play the game and find what it is)
Other thing was the introduction of a short clip(as if an old movie is playing with lines on the screen going on and off) but shows Murphy in it from a different camera angle and everything looks normal but three….(Play the game and unearth the mystery)
The things I disliked very much were also two things :
- The fighting with the monsters was not easy. Items like fireaxe, rakes, pipes, hatchet, crowbar, plank, pitchfork, handle, shovel, meat cleaver and knife littered all around the town were easy to fetch but during combat the skills required to kill the monsters with them were insufficient. To kill a monster with these Murphy had to endure an average amount of beating in return as the items eventually break apart after a limited use. Also not striking with them and blocking each attack of the monster would also break it.
- Music during the combat sequences was totally absent and throughout the game was less often. Without the music of the legendary Silent Hill series music composer, Akira Yamaoka the game felt more or less ordinary.
The only thing which helped it to reach above 7 rating was the extraordinary tweaks made to it by Vatra Games, the touch of open-worldness given to it to explore large areas, inheriting the concept of dual worlds from the Silent Hill prequels but enhancing it by making the Hell world seem more real than before by introducing to environments where the ball of energy from Hell chases Murphy through the hall passages and to escape this demon ball Murphy has to sprint and find the correct passage through the maze which leads him back to the Normal world, whereas the Normal world focuses on exploring the larger environments, puzzle-solving and completing side-quests and encountering monsters.
The ammunition for the handgun, shotgun and rifle is scarce and the firearm can be equipped only as a secondary weapon. Murphy carries a single melee weapon and a single firearm along with a torch, a radio and other collectibles. His inventory doesn’t allow holding either two melee weapons or two firarms. If he picks up anyone of these a bottle, rock, wrench, brick and chair then he puts away the melee weapon first. This shows how difficult it is to combat under these constraints with the irresistible monsters.
Though Downpour has been received with some negative reviews, on contrary I believe it did what it was supposed to do that is to keep up to its reputation. Despite complaints about stuttering issues and minute frame rates lagging, Downpour still pours down rain from the sky on millions of houses inhabited by players like us.
Overall, it is a good game and according to my experience I give it 8 out of 10.
DOn’t gO oUt iN ThE RaIn, gEt iNsiDe, It’S a
SiLeNt hilL : DowNpoUr
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