Silent Hill 2 is considered one of the best horror video games in history. That’s why fans of the series were concerned when Konami announced a few years ago that a remake was in development. After months of silence, the company unveiled a new trailer at Sony’s State of Play broadcast yesterday. And, unfortunately, it didn’t inspire much confidence…
The problem with Silent Hill 2’s combat trailer
This combat presentation trailer gave us our first real look at the gameplay of the Silent Hill 2 remake. The changes made to the original version are immediately evident: The camera switched to a third-person behind-the-shoulder perspective and the gun action is much more dynamic. This is exactly what disappointed fans: In the original game, combat was much slower and somewhat clumsy, which made the experience more intense. James Sunderland is an ordinary guy, not an action hero like Leon Kennedy. In fact, it seemed as if Konami wanted to copy from the success of the Resident Evil 2 remake.
While it’s completely understandable that Konami and developer Bloober Team want to update the old-fashioned combat of Silent Hill 2, many fans are disappointed with this trailer and accused the developers of not understanding what made the original title so special. On the other hand, the animations of the enemies in the trailer were also severely criticized, as they look strange and of low quality. In another type of game this wouldn’t be a problem, but in a dark horror story like Silent Hill, such cheap animations run the risk of breaking the atmosphere completely. Many believe that even James’ new design looks strange.
Things are not looking good for the Silent Hill 2 remake. After 24 hours since its release, it has already accumulated 20,000 dislikes on YouTube. This is far more than expected for a trailer of a “Triple A” videogame like this and shows that there is a lot of discontent among fans of the series. All these complaints about the speed of the combat, the enemy animations and the designs of James or the titular town echoed all over the internet, and people are losing hope that this remake will be as good a product as the original.
But none of this is new. Ever since the initial announcement in 2022 that people had their doubts about the Silent Hill 2 remake because of the developer Konami had chosen. Bloober Team is responsible for a few horror video games that got a rather divisive reception. While Silent Hill 2 is considered to be one of the best exponents of the genre, so it’s very difficult for them to do it justice. And it seems they are failing to live up to fan expectations. This remake still doesn’t have a concrete release date, so we’ll just have to wait a long time to see how it turns out.
What did you think of the new Silent Hill 2 trailer? Do you think Bloober Team is going in the right direction?
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