Silent Hill: Downpour

This should be so much better. But there are so many things wrong with it.

The basic Silent Hill elements are fine - the location, the characters, the switch between the nightmare world and various locations around the town, the rehashed and tired story (but you don't expect it to be anything more) ... but when you consider the 'logic' for some of the puzzles, the feeble combat, the stuttering when it loads new areas, the tedium of exploring and trying to figure out routes when so many areas look the same in the fog (it doesn't help that you're often blocked by fences which would be easy to climb over if the game actually let you).

It was the puzzles which annoyed me most - some made sense (like working out a pattern of numbers) but others could only be solved by going round and round searching every possible place and then everywhere nearby - no logic involved. One side mission involves looking for a missing part. You'd expect it to be in the building .. so you hunt through every possible room again and again. Then you resort to the walkthrough and find it's actually in another building, an unmarked building at that, far from where you would expect. Another 'puzzle' has a locked door with no key anywhere - the lock opens when you turn on the TV - but of course it does, that's how all locks work, don't they?

Overall, it's dull - relying on back tracking, tedious exploring and constant map checking and nonsense puzzles to drag out the game length.