Sholva Silent Hill 2 Review

A Superb Audiovisual Experience, and Exceptional Remake. The Silent Hill 2 remake, by Bloober Team, is an incredible game from an audiovisual standpoint. On the Visual / Graphics department, the original game had very distinct presentation, no doubt, especially the fog technology used back then, and I’m very happy to say that Bloober Team delivered beyond my expectations here. The visuals in this game are astonishingly good, with extremely high attention to detail on most assets, and incredible Lighting and Reflections thanks to Lumen, especially when using Hardware Lumen, here on PC. On my Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 3060 Ti GPU, the game can be enjoyed with some Custom Settings at 1440p and Balanced DLSS, even with Ray Tracing set to “ON” (Hardware Lumen), most of the time getting between 50 and 60 FPS, sometimes more, but there will be areas with worse performance, such as the Woodside Apartments. Furthermore, currently this game suffers from both Traversal and Animation stutters, with the former being likely the most noticeable, and it is really a major issue in so many Unreal Engine 5 games. As of the posting of this review, October 25th, 2024, there has been a single Patch released, which slightly improves the Traversal Stutters, but they’re not completely gone, and some areas are still strongly showing this issue. Moving on, to the Audio design, all I can say about it is that, in this particular aspect, Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece of sound design. The game has been mastered with Dolby in mind too, and with headphones this game is relatively above many of the peers in its genre, I can feel that much. The original game had very unique ambience sounds, and of course iconic Soundtrack, and I’m happy that Konami brought back Akira Yamaoka to the team, because this game is indeed incredible when it comes to audio design. The soundtrack well…if you know the original one…you’ll be right at home, there are new versions of the classics, but they are so good and they respect the originals so well, that you won’t notice: just sit and enjoy. Monster design is another great highlight of this remake, with Masahiro Ito back for this game, it couldn’t be any other way: the monsters in this game look incredible, even the simpler ones. Animation quality is top notch, particularly on the well-known characters that are part of the story for this game, the many nuances in, for example, James’ expression during his journey in this game, when he speaks to other characters, is one of the ways in which the developers are able to tell us more of the story, give us some hints, if we pay attention. It is really amazing to see how James’ face shows hesitation, doubt, guilt, perplexity…and so on, at different moments, and we don’t need the characters to tell us that, we see it. All the characters are very well written, respecting the original dialogue a lot and, in some cases, expanding it quite well. The Voice Acting is extremely good as well, all the actors did an excellent job in their roles, and these are very complex, emotionally speaking, characters; most Cutscenes in this game, where characters interact with each other, simply left me speechless from what I was experiencing, it’s really, really good, and I could’ve never imagined the dialogue and lines from the original, could fit that well two decades later into such a modern looking presentation for this game, but they do. Gameplay has been improved quite a bit, on the combat front, especially. It looks simple, but it works quite well: Melee combat requires paying attention to enemy patterns and dodging dangerous attacks, and ranged combat with firearms is what one could expect from a survival horror game. All in all, if we could ignore the Stuttering and Performance issues, currently in the game, I’d give this game a 10/10. But, we cannot ignore those, the game has these blemishes that need patches so yeah, I’d say 9 or 9.5/10 seems fair, as the issues are currently not game breaking for my experience, but they exist and can be measured accordingly by the proper tools.