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PC World review
[spoil]The preamble to Konami's survival horror game Silent Hill: Homecoming for Xbox 360 and PS3 is all swinging lights and latticed shadows, smeary blood splats and walls gone that peculiar glaucous color you find on the underside of unkept boats. A rock ballad pulses and thumps as we see the protagonist Alex Shepherd -- a special forces war vet -- fall through the floorboards of a house, crying for his brother. Flecks of paper mysteriously peel off walls and waft upward. Slow fans whirr in front of fiery, flickering portals. Silhouetted figures struggle with thrashing bodies on hospital stretchers. Nightmare segues into nightmare as reality churns like water poured into and out of a cup.
And that's the best part about Homecoming: It knows what it is and what it has to pull off in an experience where tension trumps all. This is your parents' Silent Hill, through and through, which for those who've never played a Silent Hill, means exploring limited-in-scope locales, reading notes, piecing together inventory items to solve puzzles, chatting up an asylum's worth of crazy people, and bumping knives, pipes, crowbars, and guns with loads of shambling uglies. If you're trawling for a revisionist take on the genre, you want BioShock down the hall, because it's strictly business-as-usual here.
Nothing wrong with playing a safe hand, of course, and the second best thing about Homecoming is that nothing about it feels awkward or fundamentally broken. The visuals -- of arguably heightened criticality in this genre -- are occasionally breathtaking, even if the aesthetic vibe rarely ventures much beyond the grimy, dilapidated haunted house look, married to the diabolical furnace room sequences in Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street. The story's reasonably well paced and sturdily presented, though it's still your average concoction of Lovecraftian tropes touching on secret societies and the consequences of hopelessly wrongheaded adulthood. The main character has off-the-shelf daddy issues, but if there's deeper symbolism than that, it was lost on me.
After an appropriately baffling introduction loaded with jolt-inducing scares that chambers you like a bullet but doesn't quite fire, you're unceremoniously loosed on the town of Shepherd's Glen, an abandoned assortment of broken-down buildings draped in a sooty miasma that makes it tough to spot your hand in front of your face. Doors abound, but you'll only be able to open a fraction of them as you endure endless "the lock's jammed" messages, ultimately following the design team's stark, singular lines, meeting the town's few remaining inhabitants and puzzling over found items and logic quests. Occasionally everything goes to hell (literally) and you "shift" into a kind of sweltering, volcanic alternative reality caged in bloodied industrial steel, where you have to solve some fundamental puzzle or other before you're able to shift back.
Generally speaking, Homecoming is one of those games that feels like perpetually gazing into a crystal ball. There's the boarded-up gate you'll eventually need the larger weapon to hack open. There's the lock you need the special key for. On the other side of various gates you can't get through are people you'll eventually have to talk to. You're always staring down where you'll eventually be going, in other words, and the gameplay's just about finding ways to shore up the distance.
Thankfully shoring up turns out to be reasonably interesting, pitting you against satisfyingly weird creatures that run the gamut. Spider-like humanoids with limbs that taper to sword points skitter between ceiling and floor. Bilious, throbbing zombies vent clouds of nasty-looking stuff that saps your health. Blank-faced women in nurse's outfits and wielding butcher knives totter deceptively toward you before springing like feral cats. When you encounter any of these, you can execute quick and slow attacks or dodge and counter with special moves. It's only superficially deep, to be fair, but that's all it has to be, since it's more about propelling you on to the next narrative reveal.
There's a rudimentary logic applied to what you ought to use and when. Weapons like knives work better against nimbler opponents, while axes dismember and dispatch lumbering giants with a few carefully timed whacks. The only downside -- and here it's important to note I played the game on "normal" -- is that some enemies, like the guys toward the end dressed in hazmat suits, are much too easily exploited, to the point you can take down dozens without suffering a scratch. Even the occasional "boss" battles against screen-hogging monstrosities are implausibly simple to win once you've sussed the pattern. I imagine it's tougher on "hard," but if you're a quick study at close quarters combat, you'll find some victories hollow.
In terms of other notable downsides, Homecoming's biggest shortfall is that it's full of too many triggered-events that arbitrarily unlock paths or open doors that previously were closed without offering any real justification. The game simply propels you forward like a dumb animal being herded through a series of gates and pens. You're even subjected to a few mindless "fast-tap" sequences where you just hammer away on your gamepad's buttons, which feel so blandly de rigueur here that I was rolling my eyes toward the end each time one popped up. Tension mechanics like Simon-Says button sequences I get. Hammering monotonously on a button I don't.
So is Homecoming worth its sixty bucks and change? It's certainly not as lengthy or re-playable as your anything-but-average BioShock or Resident Evil 4, but then it's not really trying to be. Put it this way: If you're in the mood for an action flick, something toss-away like Indiana Jones 4 or The X-Files: I Want To Believe might do. If you're in the mood for a survival horror game, Silent Hill Homecoming is like waiting for The Ring or The Grudge to hit home video, then hunkering down for an evening of trashy (but high class trashy) chills[/spoil]
Когда же он уже появится на пк...
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