I didn’t have high hopes for Silent Hill Downpour. As such, I didn’t buy it new. I waited two weeks, bought it used off ebay, and finished it over a weekend. Sadly, pretty much all of my pre-release expectations turned out to be true.

Upon booting up the game, I was immediately given mixed opinions about the game. There was a mandatory install, which fortunately only took a few minutes, but which is always an annoying thing to sit through (except for Metal Gear Solid 4, which managed to make it somewhat amusing). After the install though, I was treated to a stylish title screen with new composer Daniel Licht’s enjoyable title track.

Then the game starts, and the very first thing you do as the new main character, prison inmate Murphy Pendleton, is murder a defenseless fellow inmate during a combat tutorial that takes place in the prison showers. Murphy clearly has some beef with this fellow inmate (named Napier), and it seems like Napier probably deserved it, but murdering a defenseless person in cold blood is hardly what I’d expect from a Silent Hill game.

Table of Contents

• Combat so clumsy, it makes Silent Hill 2 look like Soul Caliber
  • Fighting (or running) for survival
• Weather the storm
  • Pointless side quests
  • Almost useless map
• A good protagonist doesn’t save a derivative story
  • Spoilers for Downpour and other Silent Hill games.
• Downpour ends up being a very sloppy game
  • Visual improvements over Homecoming are stifled by technical issues
  • Unnecessary darkness
• Trying to fix the things Climax and Double Helix did wrong
• Breaking itself with underwhelming design
  • Monsters and Otherworld are uninteresting
  • It just isn’t scary
  • And it’s not a Silent Hill game

Following the review of Silent Hill 3 on Twin Perfect’s "The Real Silent Hill Experience", DerFuzhwar, Fungo, and Rosseter assert that Silent Hill 3 should have ended the series: "Silent Hill over".

They don’t seem to have any confidence that Vatra or any other developer will be able to replicate the success of Team Silent, and that future installments are only going to dilute the quality of the series as a whole. Although they appreciate Silent Hill 4 for making a contribution to the game’s universe, they also say that it was not necessary to make, as Silent Hill 3 wrapped up the story of the franchise successfully and satisfactorily.

While I agree that the outside developers have completely squandered their attempts opportunities with Silent Hill, I respectfully disagree with their position that the series should be terminated. I still think there is plenty of material in the context of the first four games that is left to explore.

Konami recently released some early assets for the upcoming game Silent Hill Downpour. Included in these assets were new screenshots and a downloadable preview of the first track of the game's soundtrack, which is now being composed by Dexter composer Daniel Licht after series veteran Akira Yamaoka retired from Konami last year (a sad day for Silent Hill fans everywhere).