I have finished Silent Hill: Downpour twice now. One more run and I’ll be part of the 1000/1000 club. You may have gotten the impression that I really liked the game last time I talked about it, and to that end, you’d be right. It’s exactly what a Silent Hill game should be: creepy, atmospheric, mysterious, and mind-bending. It has all the best qualities of a classic-style survival horror game, but cuts off most of the cruft to make it a more brisk, enjoyable game.
There are, however, a few downsides. Pobody’s nerfect, and the Vatra team is no exception to that rule. They did a really excellent job for a relatively inexperienced studio, but there are a few things that made my playtime less than optimal. The most obvious flaw with Downpour is the horrible, horrible lag. On my first run it wasn’t really an issue until I was wrapping up a few side quests near the end. Because I was taking my time and looking into every nook and cranny, the game had more than enough time to get everything loaded up and keep the framerate at a decent level. Only when I started motoring back and forth across town did I start to notice that the engine was having a lot of trouble keeping up with me, and things got really choppy. My second playthrough was even worse, because I was basically gunning it to wherever I needed to be next, and that is apparently not how you’re supposed to play. I worry about how my third run will go, since it’s essentially going to be a speed run to pop the last three cheevos.
The other thing that really got under my skin is that there’s only one save file. I’m not such an obsessive gamer that I save over multiple files in one run, but I do like to have more than one save on hand at times. Especially since there is a point of no return near the end of the game. Aside from that though, there isn’t really a need to have more than one save in this game, but I’d like to have the option available so that I could say, have a save game that leads right into the joke ending. Downpour is also the type of game that auto-saves. And it only auto-saves. There are checkpoints everywhere, and even if there isn’t an obvious one around, you can always go into a building to save. I feel like it would just be a lot more convenient to have a button on the menu to save though. Is it really that hard? The auto-save slavery still beats having to find an actual save point, I guess.
Aside from the framerate issue, these are very minor complaints though. Having multiple save slots and a manual save option would be nice, but the game works fine without them. Other than that, I am pleased as punch with Downpour. The sentiment doesn’t seem to be too popular with the rest of the internet, but nuts to those guys. Vatra took Silent Hill in a great direction, and Tomm Hulett is most definitely still in my good books for the work he’s done with the franchise. Here’s hoping that the next one is just as good.