^Honestly, I think you probably made the best decision. That game didn't really have what I guess you could call "replayability." It's like watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie: once you've seen it and know the twist, there isn't a whole lot of reason to go back and suffer through it again.

And yeah, as lovely as that gory Pyramid Head fanservice was, it really, um... cheapens the experience. It's not all that relevant to the story, and it just ends up weakening the emotional impact, and leans up a liiiittle too close to the Fourth Wall for my comfort.

I liked Homecoming, it has some flaws, and some really cheese dialog at times ( slap you and kill you LMAO), but it had some great moments, and good enemy/boss design.
I'm surprised so many people have a hard time with Homecoming's combat. Most attacks are choreographed, and pattern based. Once you figure out the pattern it's a matter of waiting for an attack to be telegraphed, evading, and then striking, kinda like the old Punch Out games.

To be fair, you can kill any Smog with two bullets.

^Two bullets, but only if you shoot them in exactly the right place, and only when their lungs are expanded and about to choke you to death. You get an absolute maximum of two goddamn boxes of ammo, no more, so if you miss a lot, or decide to save up your ammo for a rainy day, you end up having to leave a lot of ammo behind! I don't like that. Dammit, Alex, your hammerspace pockets will hold ANYTHING but ammo, won't they? >_>

I gotta respond to some stuff earlier in this topic, about the plot being 'predictable if you've played SH2'.

Everybody says this but that's only the ONE twist. The stuff about the cult, the child sacrifices etc. is all totally different and more in an SH1 style, and I think they really work. Everybody focuses on the one "the person I'm looking for was dead all along and it was my fault" twist and forgets all of the other plot elements in the game.

I think the Game Den video of Homecoming sums the plot up really well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCt-J2u64A

You can actually finish a Smog with a well placed Axe attack, too. It's possible.

. . .well it was supposed to be the main "big unexpected twist" in the plot.

It was also extremely predictable, derivative, and dragged the entire game down into itself.

^Kinda in line with how the intertwined plots of Silent Hill: Origins both kept the other from being what it really should have been: its own story, separate from the other. The Alessa-becomes-preggo-with-demon-Jesus storyline was basically a retread of SH1 and choked Travis' story half to death, and Travis' halfway-developed story about parental abandonment and possibly being a psychotic serial killer kept the Alessa backstory from taking center stage. It just didn't work.

Much in the same vein, the ideas of "cult invades a neighboring town and everything goes to hell" and "demented male protagonist seeks a missing (but dead) loved one, whom he forgot he killed" kept each other from taking off. They tried to do too many things at the same time, and it prevented the game from being what it should've been. Plus, the second half-assed plot thread was, if you care to look at all, almost exactly the same as Silent Hill 2's!

I liked Travis' story in Origins. The prequel idea was pretty unnecessary anyway and the scenes involving Travis' backstory were the most interesting to me.

The twist is a lame retread, but that's far from the worst of it. This is probably the worst written game in the series, and that's saying a lot. In particular, the scene towards the end of the game where a certain character is revealed to be a generic villain, who then proceeds to explain their plan in James Bond fashion while you are tied up, is laughably god-awful stuff.

^And then you get to watch her act like a reject from Hostel, as she shoves a power drill in your leg! I swear, it was almost scene-for-scene a ripoff of the first Hostel movie. One of those shitty TwinPerfect videos demonstrated the similarities, and as much as I hate those pretentious dicks, they were right. :/

It's pretty awful

Welcome to the boards, Lucignolo.

Do us a favor: While we like when people look for older threads as opposed to starting new threads talking about the same thing, we would prefer that you have more than just a few words to say when you revive these threads, okay?

Happy posting.

OK, escusasse

It was meh. Just meh. They tried hard to make it a decent game and they had some interesting parts but it looked like they went out of new ideas pretty fast and then simply decide to copy stuff out of the older games, the movie and indeed stuff from Hostel.I found it enjoyable up to the part which you wake up in the police cell. Everything goes downhill from there excluding the part you go to hell and battle scarlet.

Homecoming had it's moments, but overall it was very...meh, that is the only way I can describe it

One of these days I'll make myself give it another go, but as of now I can say that it's the only game in the series (other than BOM which I haven't played) that I really dislike.

Just finished this game - I didn't care much for it at all and really just forced myself to finish the damn thing.

As I've said before (and as Distant J pointed out), I think another big twist in Homecoming is finding out about the pact SG has with the Order, and how this lovely town on the outside has this dark underbelly of murder (or "sacrifices") and secrets. I think everyone who had played a SH game before Homecoming knew Josh was dead from the start, however, we just weren't aware as to how, and why he died. Finding out that Josh's death was an accident that set off these chain of events, that the family chose Alex to sacrifice, and that Alex wasn't really in the military was imo, a nice twist.

I still laugh at people calling Wheeler the "token" Black character. As a Black male, I can relate to how Wheeler reacts in certain situations, because it's exactly how I'd react. Nothing he does is stereotypical, and I can't for the life of me understand how folks find him offensive.