It's a decent and pretty fun game in its own right. I liked some things about it, like the real-time wounds when you slash or bludgeon an enemy, the movable scenery, the music, the animations when opening doors, etc. Warning: potential TL;DR ahead.
With that being said, the last time I played it, I had not quite learned to appreciate
Silent Hill beyond being anything more than just a horror game series with weird enemies, and of course, Pyramid Head. Nowadays, I'm more prone to tearing it a new one. It's like Double Helix watched the movie and did some reeeeeeaaaaaaally minimal research on the series, skipping straight to the twists and concluding that Pyramid Head is cool and needs at least two unnecessary cameos to appease fans, nurses are a recurring monster, oh, and it's a horror game series, so its gameplay
has to cash in on the success of
Resident Evil 4. To take a quote straight from the game: "You don't know anything about Silent Hill!"
The opening scene is ripped straight from
Jacob's Ladder. I realize that the entire series was heavily inspired by it, but the way that sequence was executed borders on plagiarism rather than homage. Of course the first Otherworld transition in
Silent Hill 2 mirrors that scene as well, but it's much more subtle.
And the gore. I said before that I appreciate some of the effects like real-time wounds, but at the same time, are they really necessary? Regardless of whether you prefer the cult storyline or the psychological aspects of the series, it's
never been about violence for the sake of violence. It doesn't fit this series. At all.
Then there's the Order soldiers. Seriously, what's with these guys? All their accidental hilarity aside ("I'm gonna cut you up, SON!"), I have to point to a criticism that was made in this forum before: killing humans — EVEN in self-defense — has never been taken lightly in this franchise. There's always some sort of consequence for it. Here, though? They're just treated like a bunch of basic monsters. Never mind that they've probably been brainwashed by
As for the Order. Like many things throughout the game, their motive is ripped straight from the movie: keep the wrath of God at bay. Quite a far cry from the previous games, no? Why would they see Her judgements as anything less than holy and just? I get that there are different sects of the Order, but almost all of them are devoted to bringing about "Paradise" for at least some. The only real reason they split, from what I can tell, is that they wanted to branch out from Silent Hill. Maybe they faced persecution? I don't know. They could have at least established that. So it makes no sense why they'd go from being agents of God's wrath to trying to prevent it.
Lastly (for now, at least, because I can go on all day about the game's problems), the fog. There was something mysterious and beautiful about it in all the previous entries, but in
Homecoming, it's just grimy and dark because "hey it's scurrrrry guis!" Yeah ... I call bullshit.
Alright, that's about enough. TL;DR:
Homecoming could have been a great entry, but it was too derivative of the movie and the previous games, and was too much of a gorefest.