The only other Silent Hill game I played was a bit of 4 (The Room). It sucked and bored me to tears. This game is better but it still struck me as rather average. I've heard about how scary and downright disturbing the other games in the series were. I have to say I found this game to be quite atmospheric, but not at all scary, and more boring than disturbing.
What's more I didn't find the story or any of the characters to be particularly compelling. The story is unimaginative and unoriginal (in fact if Edgar Allen Poe was still alive I'm sure he'd be suing for royalties), and it does not unfold in such a way that compels you and makes you want to see it through to the end. You have no idea what's going on for the first 95% of the game, and then it's all explained at the end. Well, in fact it's not all explained. It explains why most of the town's population has disappeared, but you still don't really know why there are monsters running around or where they come from, or what the Otherworld event is (like in the movie where the siren goes off and everything goes all hellish), or who the guy with the pyramid-shaped head is (you'll recognise him from the movie and he has nothing to do with the story, he's simply making a cameo appearance). All in all it's unsatisfying and all a bit… meh.
The controls are done well and are an improvement from the other games (from what I've read). The camera follows you around similar to Resident Evil 4/5, and unlike those games you can actually move while you're aiming your gun. Switching weapons and accessing your inventory is no problem at all.
The thing that's probably done the best is the combat. But it's perhaps done a little too well for a game like this. I get the feeling the designers envisioned this as a combat oriented game (perhaps in an effort to compensate for other aspects of the game that are somewhat lacking), and I don't think that suits this kind of game. It would in fact be better suited to a fighting game. It's all about dodging and combos. You've got to have lightning reflexes and be able to dodge attacks. Combos also come into play, but dodging and being able to anticipate your enemies' movements and attacks are of primary importance to surviving. I wasn't really very good at this. If I waited until I saw the attack coming and then tried to dodge, it was too late and I got hit. So I tended to dodge around randomly and that was more or less useless. You've got to be on the ball with each and every fight because each and every monster is more than capable of killing you, and quite unforgiving of mistakes. There are a couple of monsters that I literally could not defeat with a melee weapon, so making sure to pick up all that ammo is a must.
The monsters themselves are suitably freaky, and the combat is sometimes genuinely tense.
Fortunately, although it's a challenging game even I made it through without too many headaches, but I would have appreciated an Easy difficulty setting instead of just Normal and Hard.
The bosses were another story. There are four of them, each harder than the last to beat, and all but one required me to check an online game guide to find out how to beat them.
There are a few fairly standard and unimaginative puzzles scattered around the game which trial and error should see you through.
One of the biggest headaches for me was that the save points are so far apart. I suppose this is an effort to heighten tension, you certainly don't want to die knowing how far back your last save point is. But the game auto saves along the way, usually just before you encounter a particularly difficult section and if you die it just reloads there. So it's not so effective as a means to heighten tension, but very effective as a means to annoy you because it's time to go to work or bed but there's no save point anywhere so you lose and hour's game play.
All in all a reasonable game, but average and uninspired. But at least it kept me occupied for a couple of days.