Though similar to Clock Tower 3, Capcom made improvements to Haunting Ground to make it a much more enjoyable game.
GAMEPLAY - Your protagonist, Fiona is by no means a warrior and when she runs into an enemy the best strategy is almost always to run for her life. However, she is not completely helpless as she is able to kick, can throw objects that will damage enemies and of course has the aid of her faithful friend Hewie the dog. Like most people, I feel that Hewie really makes the game. Fiona can give commands to Hewie to not only protect her but to also help her with many puzzles and to reach items she cannot get to herself. Giving commands to Hewie was very simple and almost always worked very well. A huge improvement over Clock Tower 3 was the boss fights. Most of the boss fights in CT3 were extremely frustrating due to some very poor play mechanics. This was not a problem in HG as it usually was a case of finding the solution to defeating the boss, which generally was pretty obvious, and then avoiding hits from the boss until Fiona could pull off whatever action she needed to do. GRAPHICS - This graphics are among the best I've seen for the PS2. The movie scenes were done by ROBOT, the same company that did the scenes for the Onimusha games, and it shows as they are simply incredible. The in game graphics were also top of the line with very detailed backgrounds. Another nice touch was watching Hewie. They did a fantastic job with Hewie's animations and it does look like you are watching a real dog. SOUND - Sound is a very important attribute for Survival/Horror, and Capcom did a great job in this area. The background music plays a key roll in your actions. There will be a general theme playing but if everything goes silent, beware! If you start hearing footsteps there's trouble on the way! Each of the main enemies has their own theme that will play when they are pursuing you and it definitely adds to the feeling of dread. The voices were also above average, and fit the characters.
VALUE - The first play through took a little over 9 hours, which is short but is also typical of a Survival/Horror game. One of the things I really like about Capcom is that they usually give a lot of bonus items after completion. There is the usual option to play a harder difficulty but there is also a bonus minigame and you can replay with different outfits that give Fiona different abilities. One bonus I really appreciate is the option to listen to all of the music and to watch all of the movie scenes. I wish other games would offer this bonus as well. Considering that you should be able to purchase this game for $10-20 I feel that it does offer a good value.
SUMMARY - In a nutshell I feel that Capcom looked at the parts of CT3 that needed improvement and applied that to Haunting Ground. I had a great time getting the creeps as I played this game, as I found it very immersive. I highly recommend this to fans of Survival/Horror, and also to anyone that wants to give this genre a try.