I'm in the middle of this game and it's seriously pissing me off. I loved playing every other game in the Silent Hill series, even less popular efforts like The Room and Origins, but the way this game is going I can see myself abandoning it before I'm even done and that's really saying something.
It's the combat, stupid. Or the stupid combat.
Previous Silent Hill games are known for their unintuitive combat, but there's a relative straight forwardness about it, in my opinion. You whack a monster, you run away, you run back up to it, you whack the monster again, rinse and repeat. Sure, I'm oversimplifying, but what I'm getting at is that it just made sense. The Silent Hill series isn't about the combat, it's about the atmosphere. That's probably why I've beaten every Silent Hill game before this one and I've never finished a Resident Evil game. But in Homecoming, it feels as though every fucking encounter is a round in a fighting game.
The biggest problem is the dodging mechanic. In previous Silent Hill games, there was no "dodge," - not getting hit simply meant moving away out of the monster's reach before you got your ass slapped, thwacked or eviscerated. In Homecoming, you press a button at the right moment to dodge. The problem is, as the game goes on, you can't get a hit in on some of the later monsters without first successfully dodging one of their hits, reducing combat in this game to "Dodge-attack-attack." It gets fucking mind numbing after a while. Plus, you've REALLY got to pay attention to the enemy animations to dodge correctly. Timing your dodges is everything in this game, if you hit the dodge button too early, you won't have enough time to get off a second dodge. This of course means that your first encounter with any new monster is simply getting your ass handed to you while you learn the timing of the animations so you can react correctly.
This is not Silent Hill style game play. This is fucking Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Virtua Fight, etc... I mean, fighting games are great for people who like that shit. There's a whole genre dedicated to dodge-block-parry based on the slightest enemy animation. But who the fuck was asking for that in a Silent Hill game?
Another important aspect to any "survival horror" style game is the option to run away. There's really no running away in Homecoming, every fucking monster you come across needs to be taken out if you want to get past, and it seems like they're all faster than you. If you try to run, you just end up running into more and more monsters and it becomes the closing credits of Benny Hill, with every monster in the level chasing after you in a line. Then you're REALLY fucked, because the only effective way to deal with multiple enemies at once is using firearms, but the one thing they held over from the other Silent Hill games is the scarcity of ammo!
Maybe I'm just frustrated because I'm in the "sewer crawl" level of the game. Sewers are always the worst levels. Silent Hill 1 had a sewer, it sucked. Vampire: Bloodlines would've been a near flawless game if not for the sewer maze. Fallout 3's weakest moments were all the sewers you had to go through. Seriously, sewers suck. Why do game developers love sewers so much? Are they really that much easier to put together than empty streets, dilapidated buildings and metal cage and barbed wire hellscapes?
Dear developers; if you're putting in a sewer level just for the sake of having "variety" over the other levels in your game - just fucking don't! The sewer is a cliche across so many genres and so many games, there's really no variety to be had there. Video games need to take a decade or two off from sewer levels before they become fresh again. The best thing you can do with a sewer level in a video game at this point would be to make it a single, straight corridor with no enemies and have it be over after only 30 seconds walking straight forwards!
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