Fresh Fish Served Daily

I'll preface this post by saying that I have loved all of the previous Silent Hill games. (Yes, even The Room, which I know had a mediocre reception among even the most hardcore of SH fans.) So it's no wonder that I would enjoy the PS2 port of the prequel, Silent Hill: Origins.

However, the game does have one serious flaw: melee weapons break after a certain number of hits. I understand that something like a glass bottle of alcohol may be considered a one-use item, but a night stick that is specifically designed for beating people should not be breaking after wailing on a couple of monsters. You still have guns, but I save my ammo for bosses, and I always used to use my trusty lead pipe for regular monsters.

The only upside of this is that you can finally just beat the crap out of stuff with your fists. In theory you could defeat most enemies with a flurry of well-timed punches. In reality the timing is pretty difficult, much more so than the previous games. I tend to just avoid most enemies and run around with my flashlight off. This is a shame, since the monsters I've encountered so far are pretty damn awesome. My favorite is a shadowy guy that you can only see because of the strange metal cage around his midsection.

The game also touts an "adaptive difficulty". As far as I know this only affects how many health drinks and ammo you find, and not the difficulty of the monsters. I'd prefer if I could dial down the difficulty myself, as I play these sorts of games more for the atmosphere, puzzles, and cool monsters than I do for melee battles of controller hurling levels of frustration.

Even with these complaints, it's still a Silent Hill game. The monsters are weird and scary. The town is covered in it's signature fog. The protagonist has a shady past with ties to the town. It's good stuff, and honestly there aren't nearly enough games that do that kind of stuff.