Silent Hill: Homecoming succeeds in some places and fails in others, but it's a great start to a new direction.
At its core, Silent Hill: Homecoming is still very much a Silent Hill game. The titular town is here - though arguably not in its glory, the story is layered and dark, there's a variety of unexplained monsters lurking around ready to rip you in half, there's a limited collection of weapons at your disposal - with an even more limited collection of ammo, and every door in the game world is still either locked or has a lock that's broken.
The problem with Homecoming is that all of these things are what make the game such a hit or miss affair. Back in the days of the PlayStation, when systems had far less integrated memory at their disposal than the PC could offer developers, the entire town consisting of locked doors made sense. Developers didn't have the storage space or the memory at hand to really make being able to enter every room in Silent Hill a reality, and gamers just didn't have the same expectations back then. We weren't as smart as we are now about catching onto things like seeing, "The lock seems broken. I can't open this door." a couple thousand times throughout the course of a game. With the advent of the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, gamers have gotten older and they've come to expect a far more detailed gaming experience. The year is 2009 and you can't honestly expect me to believe that every door in a town of a couple thousand people has systematically been destroyed to the point of not working. If the doors really are that bad, can't I just bust them down? What about the monsters - why are all of the monsters even in Silent Hill to begin with? Where did they come from? The game offers no context for why there are monsters anywhere - it takes no time to explain their origins, beyond a simple cinematic introduction for each one that generally doesn't even introduce their weakness. They simply stand as obstacles between you and your goal. Giving them no context within the game universe or the storyline is simply sloppy game design. It's dull and cliche.
Thankfully, Double Helix managed to get at least one thing right - the combat and movement. Unlike previous Silent Hill games, the main character has the ability to move about in three dimensions. Gone are the days from Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 where the control scheme went mostly unchanged from other horror genre games like Resident Evil. This opens a lot of possibilities in combat, which are further bolstered by the fact that you can now dodge attacks if you time your button presses right. Being able to dodge attacks and then quickly follow up with a few quick jabs from your knife or even a couple of shots from your gun gets you feeling like you're actually accomplishing something in a fight other than managing to outsmart the game's rigid control system. It also means that if you're a relatively good gamer with nice reflexes, that you'll be able to get through most of the game unscathed - and given the game's distinct lack of a nice supply of healing items, this is almost certainly the way that Double Helix intended you to get through it. There's only one enemy in the game that dodging isn't really an option with and thankfully, there's a couple of other surefire ways to remove it from existence without too much trouble.
The bottom line is simply that Silent Hill: Homecoming sticks too close to the tried and true traditions of the older games in the series in the places where it really shouldn't. Having every door in a town sport a broken lock just doesn't cut it anymore and plunking nameless enemies in the player's path is no longer something a gamer can look at and live with - it's things like this that need to change. If Konami sticks with Double Helix and lets them mix things up even further for Silent Hill 6 - gives them some true freedom to really bring Silent Hill into this new generation of games, then you can be sure that it will be a game to remember. Unfortunately for Silent Hill: Homecoming this just didn't happen this time around. It's the unfortunate child of a new developer and staling game series with archaic design principles. Let's all hope that the next outing is a true rebirth.