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what can I say?

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

A lot of people have been hard on this game, while others stand by it saying it is amazing.... well, it is a little bit of both really, to be perfectly honest, and before you go further, I am planing on giving away some minor spoilers to the game's progression and scares. I will admit that it doesn't hold up to Silent Hill 2 and isn't quite as scary as Silent hill 1... but I think the game is about as good as the third instalment. The story starts off really weak, with only the "trapped in the apartment" gimick to keep you going. As you get further, thigs pick up pace, and as your apartment starts to deteriorate and becomes haunted, things get far more frightening. In fact, everything up to the point where the apartment gets haunted is pretty lame (and considering there is a possibility that some people will never have a haunted apartment due to choices made in the game, it is possible your first play-through could be a little lack-luster to say the least). Combat is decent, and the story is good, when it does pick up pace. The monsters are well thought out and creepy, but due to brighter game areas, and a focus on fighting monsters rather than running, they are no where near as heart stopping as the creatures of past instalments. It is, despite a few changes, just more of the same in the Silent Hill franchise, which is a shame, As Resident Evil is off reinventing the concept of survival horror games, Konami is giving us a graphical up-date to a game that was released 8 years ago. It isn't bad, by any means, but Silent Hill 4 just doesn't quite live up to the legacy that the original built and the second and third instalments solidified. It is worth purchasing, for sure, but only for less than 30 dollars, in my opinion.

All In One!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I like this Story.. I just like the type of horror games with the stories that you can imagine yourself in the situation and how creepy it is. Im up for Silent Hill 5 for ps3

Good, fun game with some unforunate complications.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Solid game, good and fun gameplay with some unfortunate tedious aspects foreign to its series predecessors. Remarkably through all the changes still holds the unique Silent Hill quality. Worth purchasing. However, I should note that this game is most likely in a "hate it or love it" scenario. If you are a fan of the genre or series, chances are you'll love it.

Cons:
- Quest items go into your inventory with the rest of the other items, taking up the very limited space you already have and in some instances forcing the player to return back to the storage box to leave survival supplies in order to carry a quest item for a relatively short duration.
- The Megaman effect: In this game, the player will have to repeat situations multiple times with different objectives with little change to the environment.
- At times, unclear objectives or lack of explanation on certain key elements/quests.
- Simple, uninventive boss sequence.
- Some enemies seem out of place for the Silent Hill series and enemy encounters are sometimes crafted in an unoriginal fashion. Example: Increased quantity of enemies rather than increased quality.
- Ambience is not used as effectively as it was in the predecessors of the series. Sometimes ambient noises seem misplaced or irrelevant, creating a more sort of Resident Evil "jump out and scare you for the heck of it" theme park ride feel.

Pros:
+ The new feature of the room the player returns to to fulfill quest objective, heal, and resupply or store items creates an interesting environment that anyone will become submerged in with a wide variety of interesting features like looking out the room window, checking on the next door neighbor, and peering out the room's peephole while it seems as the nightmare world the player enters and the real world the player begins in slowly grow closer and closer together.
+ The new limited inventory creates a more thorough sense of the word survival in survival horror, putting the player's mind to work.
+ New, interesting, and original storyline which relates, but does not follow past storylines in the Silent Hill series heeds to some colorful characters and situations any player will become immersed in. Involves a sort of detective feel of storyline as objectives are achieved once the truth of matters is revealed to the player.
+ Graphics are well done in the traditional Silent Hill series fashion.
+ Voice acting is well done with some new quirky characters.
+ New tactical addition to the fighting system makes the eerie enemies more fun to smash than ever before.
+ Quality and conductive game mechanics. This includes: targeting, movement.

Both Pro & Con:
~ Tedious enemies the player will encounter will create an interesting sort of gameplay in which the player will have to decide whether to run or fight in dangerous circumstances based on their instincts. However, these tedious enemies can become quite obnoxious if the player wants to investigate the interesting areas that are common in the Silent Hill series.
~ Original items unique to the Silent Hill series were not included. This includes: flashlight, radio sensor, contrast of dark and light atmospheres. Although players fell in love with these unique items, the anticipation and curiosity they fulfilled is still held up in Silent Hill 4 by the interesting environments and eerie enemies.
~ The player will be responsible for a needy character who follows, fights, and protects with the player. This character is a strong fighter with poor tactics and additionally may be unresponsive at times due to this character attempting to stay out of danger's way.

not better and scary than silent hill 3

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 21, 2008
Author: Amazon User

it's still a good game, but not better than silent hill 3, that was one of the best games of the saga also with silent hill 1, but if your a silent hill fan the you have to play it and make your own review of the game. It's not scarier than silent 3 but still frightens you sometimes.

Engaging storyline draws you into the world of Silent Hill.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 21, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game did a great job of drawing you into the story. I felt like I was actually trapped in the apartment. The story was very spooky and the game had a lot of scary moments. I did complete most of the game with a walk-through as I found this Silent Hill to be difficult. This let me enjoy the storyline and not wander about for hours on end. Great graphics and sound. I do recommend this game to Silent Hill fans.

ABC: Apathetic, Boring and Cantankerous

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 14, 2008
Author: Amazon User

When you get a series like Silent Hill, your expectations for it are going to be pretty high. But every now and then a famous developing team with a famous series decides to change things around to attract new players and also to mature the series into something different rather than remake the same game. The only problem is that game developers causing a game to mature will often lend themselves to immaturity in lieu of innovation and by handing out a game to new fans, their own expectations for the game to deliver any semblance of emotional value said series was responsible for will have died out. All of this lies in the case of Silent Hill '4' The Room, quite possibly the worst fourth game in ANY series ever conceived next to Resident Evil 4 and quite possibly the worst Silent Hill game ever made featuring the dumbest subtitle ever to support the main one (The Room?? That doesn't sound ominous at all, it sounds boring... and it is).

The Room has taken a lot of different steps in order to make itself stand out from Silent Hill games, almost to the point where if you compared the two it would be hard to tell they're related. The Room doesn't depend on thick fog or thicker darkness to establish fear, rather it depends on one claustrophobic room pitched in a very dull First Person Perspective that encounters goofy low-budget haunted house noises whenever you approach something evil and doesn't inspire any feeling of being trapped despite that sense being pivotal to the plot as well as very large, bright and wide open alternate areas that are visited through a hole in the wall.

The enemies especially show little semblance to a Silent Hill game as you fight zombie dogs that scream like monkies and cats whenever they get hurt, two headed zombies that make low budget ape noises and tall female zombies in torn mini-skirts and bras wielding sticks who burp every time you hit them... yes, burp.

You even run into ghosts who, like most video game ghosts, are the cheapest, overly powered, silliest enemies you'll ever encounter in a game. Every time you get close to them, they hurt you. You can't fight them effectively without getting hurt in return even when you do wear special gift store items to guard yourself from them, but here's the biggest downer: they're everywhere. They're like Nemesis on that regard in that they follow you everywhere you go. Some of them aren't even that scary. The one that's set on fire just looks like a guy in black make-up with fake fire around him that causes more slow-down than a DreamCast racing game and one of the ghosts is a huge Ju-On/Ringu rip-off. Even weirder is that they all want to kill you for reasons the game never establishes; they have no goals, they have no purpose... they're dead people, why are they here?! And why do they all make only one noise when they chase you?

You'll notice right away that Team Silent just dug through a low budget sound effects library to deliver the game's atmosphere, some of the noises you've heard so many times in previous games they're common place. It's not a good sign when the first noise you hear is a scream you've heard in Super Nintendo and 989 Studios games. But enough technical faults, lets get to the aesthetics.

Silent Hill has always had a good idea of what a protagonist in a horror game should be like, but apparently they ditched that too by replacing the usually charismatic, occasionally emotional, but well spoken and always empathetic protagonist with a dull, mumbling, unimaginative, stoic, idiotic, anti-climactic... thing. Okay, maybe I'm making a big deal about this, but I'm not kidding when I say that the main character in this game would've been more poignant and effective if they had replaced him with a piece of card board or a brick or a tree stump. This man is DEVOID of human emotions. For what reason I don't know. The manual describes him as a boring dude, he ACTS like a boring dude and he never EVER gets interesting. Of course I can't blame all this on the hero, apparently all the other NPCs tend to be just as one dimensional, but at least some of them were more interesting than the hero and actually had a personality! I personally have never wanted to see a grown man being constantly showered with acetic acid, but if it's the main character of Silent Hill 4 we're talking about, then tell me where the ticket booth is!

Well apparently the plot isn't about him or the other characters, no-no, it's about someone else. Silent Hill loved the concept of 'sympathy for the devil,' but Silent Hill 4 tries something so alien, so different and unique that it's practically ineffective. Don't you hate it in horror media where the writers think it would be really scary if serial killers were winging, emo, religious, long haired super men whose motivation for killing is so crystal clear and perfectly explained that the character doesn't even feel insane? Well, expect that in Silent Hill 4 because the antagonist is all of that and is anything but scary, especially when you consider his origins are dependent solely on continuity errors, faulty factual assumptions and memos that treat its audience like an idiot. Much like the protagonist, the antagonist is also a formless, emotionless, cold lump of clay which makes sense for a killer I guess, but does so little to boost empathy for that character despite the fact that the game treats him like a tragic victim of society. Personally, any antagonist that hounds you throughout levels wielding two pistols who can't actually be killed permanently is the kind of character I'd rather watch get processed through a pastrami slicer.

It's actually hard to get into how bad the game play is in this game without spoiling the events in the story and considering the game takes place in an entire day the events are so constant and hurried that it's practically hard to absorb (or even believe) any of it, but the game design needs elucidation for those who don't know of the lurking horror that is The Room's game play.

In order to progress in the game, you have to shift between reality and the trade mark 'Other World' by going into a hole in your bathroom. While this feature is unique and creepy the first time around, being overly exposed to the feature on a minutely basis breaks the atmosphere considering how many times you literally have to go back and forth between reality and the Other-verse.

Some of the back-tracking adds to this as well seeing how you will have to use different elements in your apartment that you apparently can't find in the Other World despite the fact that I'm pretty sure you could clean a filth encrusted toy key by, you know, wiping the dirt off.

The Otherworld is literally broken up into distinguishable levels that are all separated by different sections that ultimately break the desire for exploration; in the first two games, you could literally explore an entire town while following the linear story line, but The Room practically locks you in a cage and sends you down a conveyor belt.

Much like Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 4 depends on the 'innovation' of having the players play the role of alpha male for that arbitrary reason that players love the idea of the brutish, dark-haired, inhuman main character scoring with a hot, foxy young woman in a mini-skirt who couldn't protect herself with a tooth pick, but thankfully unlike Resident Evil 4, the female in Silent Hill 4 can actually protect herself after being severely injured (dayumn) and is so motherly and intelligent that she ends up being the best character in the game! All of this kind of wears off however when you consider the emotional connection between an emotional woman and a living, breathing piece of petrified crap and the fact that you have to save her by keeping her from fighting, thus helping you. At least in this case you can't blame her for running slower than you seeing how she has a sprained ankle.

You will also have the option of saving this person from a lingering danger over their head. While looking after her was a seemingly mindless chore, I felt naturally inclined to do so because with the escort-mission aside she was the only character in the game I didn't genuinely feel like jumping into the screen and incinerating them with a flamethrower out of unbridled rage, so saving her was a must for me. However, in order to do this you have to use items that take upwards to half a minute to heal her and considering that she just gets more affected a minute later and if you let her fight even once past the third revisitation you're going to be spending a lot of time healing her which means sitting around scratching your nose waiting for nothing to happen.

Even saving your game gets to be obnoxious because you only have one save point and at later points in the game said save point will be guarded by things that can hurt you and even kill you if your not careful.

But you know what the worst aspect about this game is? The endings. All of them. Each and every one of them are devoid of a climax, emotion, dread, accomplishment... even sense and logic.I've played games where your only ending is repeating the entire game over again for no reason, I've played games where all you get is a text saying 'Congratulations, you won' and I've played games where the only ending is a still image where the credits scroll up... and those... ALL of those endings were art compared to the endings of Silent Hill 4 The Room.

Ultimately I found this game to possess the dreadful ABC of gaming that it was so Apathetic, Boring and Cantankerous that I couldn't logically find myself playing it out of fear or interest without wanting to turn it off and play one of the many Resident Evil Clones from the 1990's even if they weren't that good and a game that I end up playing only so I can protect the jiggly young woman in the mini-skirt and hope the hero ends up dying in the process isn't a game dedicated to being scary or involving.

Silent Hill 4 the Room was not a fun or scary experience for me and was about as insulting to my patience as it was to my intelligence, but if you like blatant Ringu knock-offs, boring, brown haired, emotionless heroes and more plot line movie rip-offs for the sake of originality in a horror game then dig right in. Personally, I think there's enough of this trite in horror movies today, so why bother?

A very changed, but phenomenal Silent Hill game!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: September 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I just played this game and am just about half way through the whole game and I have to confess "This game does differ from the other Silent Hill games" but this is in a good way.
This game tells the story of Henry Townshend, a guy who lives in Ashfield, a town not far from Silent Hill. One day, he starts having nightmares that are being repeated every night, since then, he has not be able to step outside his apartment because of the dozen locks all over his door with a note :
Don't Go Out
Walter
As I said before this game has changed from the other Silent Hill games, and I actually like Konami's new gameplay. For instance, in this game, you don't have a radio of static or a flashlight (cuz most of the places you will visit are very bright atmospheres and is easy to spot a monster in it's tracks), which I feel has been a great idea by Konami. In the last Silent Hill games, the atmospheres seemed to be so incredibly dark, even I could not go through the game smoothly, and I think that's what Konami was trying to do, make the horror "smoothly" at a great pace. To explain, the scares in this game aren't up to the ranks of Silent Hill 3, but the scares in this game feel "smooth" and not a HUGE scare at one minute and a LITTLE scare after that. Silent Hill 4 has scares that I can say runs "smoothly" and won't make you want to shut off the game because of how scary it is, and I actually like that. Great thought and idea Konami for trying this method of scares. They feel so much classical and, again, "smoothly"!
Another thing different in this game from the other Silent Hill games is the gameplay part. In the middle of gameplay, in order to swithc a weapon, you ACTUALLY CANNOT put the game on pause...NOW you have to switch weapons during gameplay, which is to make the switching weapons more realistic. Most of the weapons you have in the game are pipes, baseball bat, and very few firepower but the melee weapons are still your trusty and main weapons in this game.
The grpahics, as people have also said before me, has slightly improved from Silent Hill 3. I shouldn't really be saying the graphics are better in this game cux it sounds like SH3's graphics weren't phenomenal like these. On a scale from 1 to 10 on graphics, I pick 11 cuz these graphics I guarantee cannot ANY MORE realistic, they're so realistic, it's scary!!!
Overall, I love this game and is a good welcome to newcomer Silent Hill fans because this game is a little more easier than the other Silent Hill games, so newcomers will be comfortable with this game. When your ready, newcomers, you can play TWICE as scared in the other games, but first start out with this game. Muhwahahahaha!

silent hill 4 ----

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 6
Date: January 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I played silent hill 2 and silent hill 3 and got hooked. To me they are the scariest games ever. But silent hill 4 alright but ,I just wished that it keep me to the edge of my seat if you know what I mean.

One of the best...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 4
Date: March 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill 4 is as much of a masterpiece as 1 and 2. 3 was a gigantic letdown, I don't know why but I play that game least. I like it, but it's the first to take place outside of Silent Hill, which is what happened with 4. The apartment isn't even in SH, so most of the game is outside the little town. That's my only complaint, because what fun is a SILENT HILL game if it's not even in Silent Hill? Quite a bit, actually, but still.
This game plays alot like the third game- heavy combat. This one, however, has much more of a story than SH3, and much more interesting, too. It still falls incredibly short of the greatest game ever created, Silent Hill 2, but it's unfair to compare the two. So I won't. This game is worth every penny, no matter what some braindead retard says. Buy it.

good entry for the series, but not as good as SH2/3

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: March 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed this game for the most part, but not as much as SH2 and SH3, which were both fantastic. The idea of returning to your apartment in between each adventure kinda makes the game feel like you're progressing through 'levels' and breaks up the normally smooth flowing plot development.

Worth the 20 bucks for sure for general players (I paid 40 bucks for it at release), and SH fans will want it to have the complete series to date.

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