While it offers some great ambience, the suspensful tone of Silent Hill 2 is undermined by its unimpressive gameplay.
Although it tries very hard to creep you out, Silent Hill 2 doesn’t quite succeed in terms of being a “scary” survival horror game. Although the game is laden with ambient lighting and sound effects, which contribute to the overall tension of the game, Silent Hill 2 is bogged down by too many problems with the actual gameplay that, unfortunately, keep it from ever being a truly scary game.
Seeing the Silent Hill series moved to the Playstation 2, fans would probably hope for more than just a cosmetic upgrade to their favorite survival horror series...but unfortunately Silent Hill 2 doesn’t offer much of a change over its predecessor in the gameplay department. In fact, one of the only notable changes that the game has made is that players now have the option to switch from the somewhat awkward 3D control scheme to a more arcade-like 2D control scheme. While hardcore fans of survival horror games may stick with the 3D scheme, casual gamers will most likely drift toward the 2D scheme. Otherwise, the gameplay in Silent Hill 2 consists mainly of exploring the creepy environments, finding key items in order to progress, solving the many puzzles that the game throws your way, and fighting the occasional monster.
The meat of the gameplay in Silent Hill 2 is the exploring. Players will spend most of their time wandering through the various locales in Silent Hill, and the game often does a considerably good job of creating tension by forcing the player down the dark, ominous corridors and foggy streets that permeate the Silent Hill universe. This game, like Silent Hill before it, uses ambience and slow-pacing in order to unnerve the player, rather than just throw a bunch of scary monsters at you. The problem is, this approach doesn’t always work.
Part of the problem is in the pacing of the game. As soon as you start the game up, it can take over 30 MINUTES to reach the first monster in the game, and even longer to locate the first building that you can actually venture into. After you find the key to the building, that is. This may be all fine and dandy with veterans of survival horror, but casual gamers may find Silent Hill 2’s glacial pacing to be boring and irritating rather than creepy or suspenseful.
Some aspects of the game get better as you play on, while some aspects get worse. One of the high points of Silent Hill 2 is the game’s environments. Get ready to do a lot of wandering through dark, abandoned hotel buildings, hospitals, and what can only be described as a nightmare come to life as you search for your wife, who may or may not be dead. These locales are fairly well-done and detailed, and some nice audio effects help to up the creep factor. Many of the environments in the game will even morph and transform, taking on an almost organic appearance. It’s times like these when the game is at its best. However, most of the level design in Silent Hill 2 is not very exciting...quite the opposite actually. As the game drags on and you become more and more frustrated because you can’t find out what it is you have to do or where exactly you have to go next, the level designs become a lot less creepy, especially when you’ve ran down the same dark hallway for the nth time. To the game’s credit, the later levels are much more entertaining, one specific portion that stands out in my memory is a stretch near the end of the game in which you become trapped deep underground and must pass through an ancient prison. It was during this portion of the game that I believed Silent Hill 2 had achieved exactly what Silent Hill games are supposed to: Make the player feel isolated, lost and utterly helpless. It’s just too bad that the tension in Silent Hill 2 is so inconsistent, because there are sequences in the game that could have been a whole lot scarier if not for the game’s unfortunate flaws.
The “combat” in Silent Hill 2 pretty much takes a backseat to...well, everything. (except maybe the dialogue.) This is the one aspect of the game that just downright sucks, and it nearly sinks the rest of the game along with it. I know that this isn’t God of War or Devil May Cry, but could you manage to find me a more annoying combat system? The combat in Silent Hill 2 is tedious at best, and absolutely aggravating at worst. It doesn’t even seem serve a purpose, except to give the designers an excuse to tell gamers that Silent Hill 2 actually features combat. Some unbelievably terrible, clunky combat. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the weapons and combat in Silent Hill 2 are laughably unbalanced. In the beginning of the game, you’ll probably die a few times while attempting to inflict damage on your enemies with a wooden plank and a lead pipe, while later in the game you’ll come across weapons like the Shotgun, Pistol, Hunting Rifle, and Great Knife (Which is exactly what it sounds like.) The game gives you way, way too much ammo for the firearms, which pretty much renders the melee weapons useless. You can end up with literally hundreds of rounds of ammo for your guns, meaning that you can go through the entire game without having to resort to melee combat. Basically, later in the game James becomes an invincible powerhouse who can mow down monsters with ease, if you even decide to fight them at all. This takes a LOT away from the game’s creepiness. It’s just too hard to feel terrified when you know that the monsters don’t pose a threat. This is especially true in the outdoor areas. In one sequence, which takes place at night in Silent Hill, you can simply run past (or walk past) all of the monsters roaming around outside, since none of the monsters in the game can move very fast anyway. You’d figure that wandering around, by yourself, at night, in a haunted town would be scary...but factor in near-unlimited ammo, and monsters that can’t catch you if you left the room without pausing the game to go to the bathroom (Yes, I did that.) and you’ve got a pretty lame attempt at horror. As the game wears on, it becomes more and more apparent that nothing scary is going to happen.
The game’s lackluster combat is really too bad, because the monsters in Silent Hill 2, while not the deadliest beasts you’ll ever face, are actually pretty well-done. Whether or not you find them “scary” is up to you (I didn’t really), but either way you should find them to be fairly impressive and well-designed. Enemies range from the Lying Patients, which are disgusting, zombie-like creatures who appear to be wrapped up in a thick layer of flesh, to nurses, which are basically nurses...with no faces...and lead pipes. My personal favorite enemy (this is a favorite of many Silent Hill fans as well) would be Pyramid Head, a sadistic freak who wields an enormous butcher-knife and enjoys violating other monsters. Oh, and he’s got a giant pyramid on his head. I don’t know, so don’t ask.
One problem with the game’s enemies is that there isn’t enough variety. Most of the enemies all look very similar, and they don’t behave much differently from each other either. One enemy, a little cockroach-like creature, is...what’s the word...ah yes, LAME.
The sound in Silent Hill is both one of the high and low points of the game. For the most part, the sound does a good job of adding personality to the levels, whether you’re listening to the slow dripping of water and creaking floorboards of an abandoned apartment building, or the lonely, hollow creaking noises that resonate from within the walls of the Brookhaven Hospital, Silent Hill 2 pretty much delivers in the sound department. My only complaint with the ambient sound effects would be that sometimes a sound effect can repeat too often, making an environment feel a bit like a cheap haunted house. However, there are other good audio effects, such as the sickening groans and hisses of the monsters, as well as the static emitted by the radio when monsters get close, a staple of the Silent Hill series.
I wish I could say otherwise, but the sound in Silent Hill 2 falls flat when it comes to the voice-overs. To tell the truth, the voice actors in this game are actually not that bad. No one’s going to win an Oscar, but the acting in SH2 is at least decent. What kills the believability of the situations, though, is the dialogue. Characters are far too casual for people who are trapped in a hellish, haunted town. Instead of acting horrified at the gruesome events going on around them, characters discuss things in a very matter-of-fact kind of tone, which is strange and somewhat annoying to say the least.
MEMORABLE DIALOUGE MOMENT: James is talking to the character Angela, and both are standing on a staircase in the middle of a room that is being ravaged by a fire. After having a lengthy conversation, James scratches his head and exclaims: “It’s hot as hell in here.”
It’s too bad that the acting and dialogue in Silent Hill 2 aren’t very good, because those who pay attention to the game will find that it actually has a fairly good story. Those who look into the backstory will find deep, emotional and mature themes backing up the game’s plot. In fact, the ending of the game (at least, the one I got, as there are 6 possible endings.) actually left me feeling a deep sense of sadness. While the rest of the game’s cutscenes weren’t anything to get excited about, the ending was surprisingly moving, and was definitely one of the more memorable endings that I’ve seen in a videogame in a long time. Fans of the game have formed many theories regarding what Silent Hill actually is, and what meaning is hidden behind the events of the game. To tell the truth, it would be a lot more fun to discuss if the game was more fun to play.
Overall, Silent Hill 2 comes off as a somewhat unsettling, disturbing, and slightly underwhelming experience. Ambience is good, but it wouldn’t kill the designers to tighten up the actual gameplay. Scary or not, there’s no point in playing a game if you aren’t going to have any fun. Silent Hill 2 does offer some great tension and ambience at times, but the game’s suspenseful tone is ultimately undermined by its unimpressive gameplay.
PROS AND CONS
FEELING CREEPY
+ Good use of ambient sound and lighting
+ Disturbing enemy designs
+ The plot is actually pretty deep when you stop and think about it; there is some emotional appeal connected to the story
FEELING SLEEPY
- The game’s pacing is just too slow; a lot of the exploring is more boring than fun.
- Clunky combat and unbalanced arsenal kill a lot of the game’s mood
- Dialogue and voice-acting are pretty silly