The boss battles are fantastic, with one of the most disturbing final bosses you are likely to find. Controlling Alex in a boss fight can be a bit of a struggle, as he moves a bit sluggish in battle. While it works fine in smaller fights, where you want to remain close, in most boss battles there are times you want to get far away from the action. There are the occasional quick time events, though they are not as bothersome as you would expect. Tapping a button to cut through a painting does not make a lot of sense, but the ones to shake free of a major attack work well. The boss battles typically end with them, though they are the one-button variety rather than the annoying several-button sequence of most games. The quick time event near the conclusion, involving a major character, has a particularly killer payoff.
The boss fights, while difficult, are somewhat more manageable than some of the regular enemies, where the camera occasionally puts up a decent fight of its own. The game takes place in various cramped hallways and smallish rooms to give you a claustrophobic feel, but the camera does not handle the tight spaces very well. It keeps up with you fine, as long as you are running down the hallways, but when you are trying to evade enemy attacks, it can get stuck to the wall at an awkward angle that does not give you a good view of the fight. When taking on multiple Schisms, it will often lead to a frustrating death.
The camera system is really the biggest complaint with the game. The game is in third-person, with Alex in the center of the screen. The two sticks control your movement, with the right stick also serving as your camera control. The camera feels very old-school third person, and handles poorly. While it is a ‘new’ camera system for the game, it does not feel much different from the lackluster systems used in previous iterations. Outside of the camera issues, the game looks great; despite the overly drab color scheme and some questionable lip synching in the cut scenes. The character models look great, and the creepy animations of the enemies are effectively fluid and twitchy, where they should be.
For a single-player experience, Homecoming offers a decent amount of replay value. There are drawings from Alex’s brother and various pictures to find, and five different endings to seek out. There are a few points in the game that you will face a decision on how to handle the situation, which feed directly into the game’s conclusion. These could have been handled a little more effectively, though. Only one of the decisions directly follows a save-point, allowing you to easily go back to your previous save and handle it differently. The decisions also start fairly late in the game, with the first one about three-quarters of the way through. Still, the concept is great, and the moral choices you have to make each time make sense within the story.
Silent Hill Homecoming delivers one of the few solid survival horror experiences on the system. The genre used to see a release a month, and gamers are lucky now to get two a year. Homecoming’s great story calls for a rebirth of the genre, even if the gameplay occasionally does not.
