Forum - View topicGAME: Silent Hill 2 (2024) Video Game Review
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 516 Location: PA / USA |
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Blip bloop bloobledy blop.
I disagree with the review saying the environments aren't detailed enough. I frequently walk through the original in VR, and even compared to the way that Shattered Memories dots environments with mementos and lore bits, I thought they popped up more frequently (and more importantly, in places you remember them from the PS2 days) on the SH2 Remake since they often let you into more buildings than previous so as to look for items. If you're not playing with Hard combat, then you may not be using as much ammo, and when its as scarce as it can be on Hard, combing the nooks and crannies becomes incredibly rewarding. I'm very pleased with about 90% of the checkpoint system. I'm a bit disappointed in how Hard mode is balanced. If auto-saves were a thing on Standard combat, I think it would have ruined the game for me - currently, if you lose to a boss on St/H difficulty, the game will place you back at the start of the encounter.... which looks really dumb if something like Pyramid Head just cut you down.... suddenly you're back like nothing happened. But in all other cases, the terror of losing usually-minimal progress is the sort of tension I play these games for. I would petition newer & less-patient players to make a conscious effort to backtrack and save more often rather than just wish checkpoints were more generous than they currently are. That said, post-Hospital region, Hard mode is semi-unplayable. They very much need to turn down the encounter rate. There's legitimately a lot of situations where too many things will try and jump you, and you quickly start to find the constant enemies to be mundane rather than scary. It's not that they're too challenging, it's that they're too frequent and thus mess up the tension & they spoil the mystique of encountering them. The perfect ideal way to play would be Hard combat with Standard puzzles, and a mod to lower the encounter rate, or make the enemy placement more unique post-hospital. I'm in the Prison area myself right now, and the Silent Hill 2 Remake has been a beautiful marriage of everything I loved about the original, while adding in a lot of what I loved about Shattered Memories. It's a shame the PC version has technical problems. In general, I hope the game wins an audio award. Overall, once it goes on sale, I'd say it's a must-buy, even on PC, and especially if someone with a mod can tweak enemy placement to be smarter & fix up Eddie a bit, as he probably could have used some extra time with the art team. |
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wolf10
 Posts: 923 |
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I first played the PC port of the original some 20 years ago, and played it again right after the remake was announced to have it fresh in my mind but not too fresh. I'll need to find time to go through this one again on my preferred combo of Easy combat and Hard puzzles (glad that's still a thing), but as a remake it's pretty solid. I never really felt like I wasn't playing Silent Hill 2, though a couple places had me double-checking that I hadn't slipped into Alan Wake 2 at some point.
I would have preferred more time out in the western side of the map and less time in the hospital's spoiler[pre-Otherworld] section, but the eastern map was definitely a worthy update (going inside stores and busting windows instead of just collecting items placed carefully out in front). I skipped one puzzle entirely (spoiler[the broken clock]) because I figured out enough of the clues to brute-force the padlock. Despite suddenly having Rule of Rose-meets-Bloodborne combat and enemy density, a few enemy types were removed and I don't miss them at all, though the new enemies can f__k right off back into the fog from whence they came. Running like hell is still the dominant strategy in outdoors sections (especially spoiler[the post-hospital section] that I just played like Shattered Memories), though the seamless environments mean that you can no longer escape through doors. I had a nurse follow me into a save room, and she was still there on a reload. The new version of spoiler[the hotel] is pretty close to the definitive experience, though cutting certain enemy encounters (at least from what I saw on Normal) dramatically improved the overall play experience at the cost of accidentally removing the only lead-up to one of the game's most iconic scenes. The new voice cast is good all around (everyone still sounds about the same, which was quite a trick), though Donna Burke's Angela is an incredibly tough act to follow. The PC version (apparently) has functional mirrors in more than the one room that required it for ambience. I played on PS5 but I might have to pick up a second copy on sale because SH2 is kind of a cozy weekend game for me. |
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Doubleclouder
 Posts: 75 |
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I have no real interest in playing this remake and have watched a few people play it and can't say I like some of the changes they made that i saw but I am genuinely surprised to hear they did not add check poitns or auto-saves to make the game easier. Auto-saves or checkpoints belong in a game like this, especially as the original game did not have them. The entire point is risk VS reward and if you feel threatened you should backtrack to a save point. I think modern gamers have become too reliant on easy fallbacks like checkpoints and avoiding consequences. At the very least that is keeping with the spirit of true survival horror. gameplay even if I don't agree with the other changes made to the game.
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YagamiBlackstone255
Posts: 177 |
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Everyone and their dog's grandma thought this was going to be a REALLY SHALLOW and AWFUL remake. Good that it is GREAT. I wont ever play it but I wanna give credit where it's due.
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