Silent Hill is a survival horror game in which a father searches a ghost town for his daughter while evading demonic things that want him dead. It does a genuinely good job of conjuring the mood of a scary movie: the music shifts as you near somewhere bad, so you know something is coming but never quite when. You spend your time solving puzzles and hunting clues, which can grate because some of those clues are hidden very well.
The enemies are smart most of the time, which keeps the combat interesting. In a lot of games you just mow things down, but here you have to be resourceful, since you scrape by on hardly any bullets. The fog that wraps around you makes spotting enemies at any distance impossible, so they sneak up on you constantly, and that gets old fast. If you loved the Resident Evil series there is real fun here, but I personally got too annoyed to find it as enjoyable as I wanted to.
The control is the worst part. It is the Resident Evil style, a little smoother, but not smooth enough: I kept running into buildings, light posts and whatever else was around. The real frustration is combat, where I could never line up a weapon easily while a creature was already chewing on me. With anything other than a gun it is hard to land a hit, since you swing too early or too late and the thing starts killing you. Better than Resident Evil, but it still needs a lot of work, because anything involving movement is just hard.
The graphics, on the other hand, are very good. The ghost town feels real and you can always tell what things are, and the in-game movies are about as good as I have seen. The one odd note is that when the hero gets hurt, a puddle of blood simply appears beneath him, which feels like a missed opportunity. The sound sits a little above average: the voices, screams and effects all land on time, though the radio that warns you of nearby enemies sounds genuinely awful.
Overall, Silent Hill is best enjoyed by lovers of Resident Evil. The atmosphere and smart enemies are real strengths, but the clumsy control and constant fog ambushes wore me down. If that series was not for you, this one probably is not either.
