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More Reviews
Need For Speed 4 (April '99)

But already the genre has settled into a steady and recogisable idiom. Resident Evil 2 has been and gone and now here, staggering over the horizon like a mutilated zombie, comes Silent Hill, Konami's latest offering to the interactive B-movie experience.

Silent Hill's story revolves around a normal man instead of a tactically trained law enforcement officer as in Capcom's original horror-fest. You take the role of Harry Mason, a man trying to forget the tragic loss of his wife. Late at night, while on the way to the resort town of Silent Hill with his young daughter, he swerves off the road to avoid a motorcycle and crashes the car, knocking himself out. When he comes-to his daughter, Cheryl, is missing. Oh - what to do! Call the poice? Nah, what the hell, let's wander off into the mist enshrouded night toward the eerily deserted ghost town up the road. Makes sense to me.

Harry soon encounters nightmarishly demonic creatures roaming about the town and thus begins the horror as he struggles from nightmare to nightmare in a desperate bid to get his daughter back. Placing the story in the realm of a regular guy is actually one of the game's strengths; Harry's goal is one most people can identify with, one that actually makes the concept of moving through a series of hellish environments less absurd than usual. The plot unfolds through engagingly dark and imainatively rendered scenery and the story overall is good, if not as refined as it could have been given some tweaking here and there.

Gameplay is a mix of third-person, real-time, and puzzle solving. The puzzle solving aspects will be familiar to veterans of Resident Evil and mostly involve getting a key to open a door behind which is hidden a disc you need to operate a computer etc. etc. Generally, it works pretty well, but there are some major problems. Control feels so odd when you first start playing that it can be very irritating. The problem lies in the game engine's use of a smart camera to convey more cinematic angles. The camera moves to interesting positions but the controls remain the same, so that pressing up always moves Harry forward, while left and right rotate him; this is fine for certain angles, but a real pain for others. Things get particularly red-face/throbbing-vein-in-the-temple   inducing when you need to manouvre Harry during combat. Precise control is needed at such times, and you just ain't got it.

Overall a good try from the guys at Konami, but more time should have been spent on the game engine and less on FMV sequences. Now - anyone for another glass of blood?...

Top

UPPERS
Moody
Lovely graphics
Subdued horror, not in-yer-face
Scary

DOWNERS
That game engine
Well, its all been done before innit.

THE LAST WORD
A nice effort but you might be better off saving
your money for Resident Evil 3.