Silent Hill 4: The Room (Xbox)

Irritatingly though the original PS one title remains the best of the series with the last two PS2 titles being little more than hi-res rehashes. The Room manages to shake things up a bit though, ditching the radio and flashlight gimmicks and adding twice the normal amount of side characters and a more involved fighting system. There's also a number of completely invincible bad guys and a new Resident Evil style limited slot inventory system.

The room in question, as you're no doubt wondering, is in fact the toilet. Playing yet another everyman character you wake up from a rather disturbing dream to find out that you're locked inside your flat and the only way out is through a gateway to hell next to the privy. Which almost sounds like a BlackAdder joke, but is unlikely to have you laughing after your first trip.

Within your flat the game uses a first person view, with the series' more traditional third person viewpoint taking over when you go through the portal. A series of weird lens filters and excellent (i.e. very unpleasant) sound lends a real otherworldly feel to proceedings, so that when things do choose to go bump in the night at you, you end up being very scared indeed. --David Jenkins

Silent Hill 4 continues in effectively the same tradition as the previous installments. A third person action/adventure game using the same fixed angle cameras, grainy filtering, and a bizzarrely unsettling collection of characters creatures and demons. It centres around a guy called Henry, who awakes in his appartment one day to find it totally sealed up from the inside, a note painted in blood on the inside warning him not to go out, and after some poking around discovers a small hole in the bathroom, which takes him to strange alternate worlds beset with ghosts, demons and curiouslyt interwoven with reality. Henry soon finds himself embroiled in the work of a serial killer, somehow related to his own appartment, and must battle to uncover the truth about Walter, and set himself free from the room.

The big plus point really is the inclusion of the first person section in the room itself, and the sometimes unsettling use of the peepholes, sounds, and other effects in the appertment. In fact I would say that all of the decent scares actually come from this mode. The actual main game itself was very disappointing. It plays exactly the same as it's predecessors, but whilst the story is engaging, the monotany of getting from one part to another really starts to take it's toll. Essentially from start to finish, the game is nothing more than a collect-these-objects-and-put-them-here type of game, which is pushed along by the insultingly horrible device of people leaving reams of notes and diary entries everywhere which act as nothing more than a list of instructions for you to carry out. That said, the hard difficulty level offers you less help in this way, but there are no Silent Hill 3 style sliders to adjust the difficulty of the arcade sections, so the game becomes very difficult in all regards.

Also and probably more importantly, the Room just isn't really that scary. After a very short while, I just found myself plodding on through it like a normal third person game, it just didn't manage to evoke that same sense of foreboding as previous games that would make you tread slowly, spin round at strange noises, and have you totally on edge at what was lurking in the darkness. The creatures were a let down too on the whole, just seemed nowhere near as inventive or downright disturbing as previous games, although the ghost victims were great and offered an extra dimension to the gameplay.

But probably, above all, the most criminal thing about Silent Hill 4 is the fact that it re-uses every single location that you travel to in the other realm. So you basically end up trudging round the same place two completely different times with different aims, where only a handful of things have changed. This was a dreadful move on the part of the developers. After spending an hour or so exploring the prison world, reading notes, and working your way out of it, the last thing I wanted to do was have to do it all over again in a very sligtly different way a few levels later - it absolutely ripped the soul out of the game.

So who is Silent Hill going to appeal to? Well definitely to hardcore fans of the series, or the survival horror genre in general. Also, the story is strong, and intruiging enough to keep you going - if you're interested in the unravelling of a mystery, it'll also not let you down. But if you love Silent Hill for the scares, creepiness and atmosphere, I wouldn't recommend this particular one in the series, because it falls way short. Also it is really not gonna appeal to you if you're more interested in the adventure side of action/adventure because there are simply no puzzles to solve in this game - merely things to collect, and places to stick them. To people wanting the ultimate Silent Hill experience, Silent Hill 2 is by far and away the best of the series. I don't know if they are going to do a fifth in the series, but if they do I hope that they learn from the mistakes of the Room.