Silent Hill f - PlayStation 5, Amazon Exclusive Day One Edition

Excellent game, one of the best in the series. The only downside is this is probably the most combat heavy game of the series, but the atmosphere, story, horror, dread, sound are all amazing. Very well done, kept me on the edge the entire time. The story kept me guessing, and the horror hits harder than any other silent hill before this. If SH2 is a 10, this is a 9.5

Silent Hill has been psychological horrors and avoiding your enemies as much as possible, and that's not what this is. I guess if it has anything in common with any Silent Hill game, it's Silent Hill Homecoming, very sloppy combat focused that you are constantly forced into. And most of the time, yes you have to fight the enemies and your weapons will break. The enemies will also get a lot of hits on you and you'll usually use most of your healing resources in one battle. It stinks of being a Dark Souls clone, except with horrible combat. Silent Hill has also always been about themes of abuse, mental illness and so on. While there are touches of them here, it's nothing more than a generic Japanese ghost folklore. The characters are uninteresting, the environment is pretty bland and the map is a little convoluted, making it hard to navigate even though the town isn't really designed for exploration, you know like a Silent Hill game. Like I said, it's more of a dark souls clone so it's just follow a path that only gives the illusion of being a world you can explore, but really you're going from point a to point b destination, while you mash attack and Dodge at enemies. I feel so ripped off and normally Silent Hill has amazing stories and I can push through even the worst ones just because I'm interested in the plot, but this is so uninterested and I don't care.

* Id consider this game way more a 7/10 but amazon 5-star makes that hard to get acrossFirst off - I dont think this game is bad, that being said there is alot here that hurts the experience.The atmosphere, creature designs, and overall look of the game are great. The puzzles and exploration have been quite enjoyable, especialy since, not since maybe siren on ps2, we get a horror setting in a older era japanese.All that being said, these great experiences are bogged down by the worst aspect - combat. Combat in Silent Hill F is functional but just feels terrible. You have a stamina bar that takes forever to start to refill, you have no recovery frames after being hit so enemies can just combo hit you for up to 50-70% of your health, you have a limited amount of inventory slots (8 by default), enemies can just outpace you even if you run making certain areas an absolute chore to deal, enemy grab attacks that are just a way to chunk off 25% of your health without anyway to knock them away, and a terrible weapon durability system. On the flip side Hinako has a great dodge, a perfect dodge that takes no stamina and a counter attack that instantly knocks down and stuns an enemy.What all that does is just make combat a jumbled mess like it doesnt know if it wants to be survival horror or a action rpg with horror elements. The other main issue is difficulty balance. There are 2 modes by default - story and hard. Story mode makes half the items practicaly useless since you dont engage with half the systems around health and the sanity meter, where hard mode makes those an important resource to manage but also enemies have 2x the health and deal way more damage. So you get the bad coin toss of story mode treating you like you are too stupid to play the game correctly and hard mode being the worst type of difficulty increase by just upping monster damage and health.Theres alot of good in Silent Hill F but I am finding the bad out weighing it to the point Im struggling to put in the last efforts to finish it up. If you want a closer to survival horror experience Id say buy "Cronos: The new dawn: instead, its not perfect but it is a way more truer survival horror experience.

Yeah...overhyped. For those who were die hard OG fans of silent hill, and even for newcomers who enjoyed the SH2 remake...this isn't Silent Hill. The story is flat, the characters are flatter, the maps are repetitive, the combat is clunky and worst of all, above all else, its just not scary or unnerving....which is what SH fans want. This feels like some other game entirely that they just slapped the SH name on, in order to sell copies. Its essentially the Mario Bros 2 of the Mario universe (for anyone old enough to understand that reference).