Just finished Silent Hill Townfall.
+ Setting is top tier. Loved St. Amelia and Clara Woods. Even the CEG HQ building was great.
+ Atmosphere is fantastic. Up there with the best in the series for me.
+ Overall story is quite good.
+ Playing as other characters was a nice touch to understand their backstory.
+ Combat was fine. It's supposed to be considered last resort, and it felt that way. (except for the Richards part in the tower).
+ First person was quite refreshing, especially for this type of game. Although, I'd love to see a 3rd person mode.
And now for the negatives. I would go way more in depth if this was a YouTube video, but this is Twitter, so I shall keep it concise for the sake of attention spans:
- About 70% through the game, it turned into a slog, and the pacing felt quite disjointed.
- Just when you think the story is supposed to be progressing well, the game throws many of the typical "go find X amount of items" at you to proceed.
- Puzzles were fine for the most part, but the amount given to you in a row is silly, especially in the last chapter. God knows what type of puzzles those were.
- Stealth is barebones. You just sit behind an object waiting for an AI routine to finish. You can’t even back attack. (I wanted Silent Hill f to put more focus on stealth, but Townfall barely does anything with it. They really need to find a proper balance for the future, because it's too disjointed).
- Otherworld sections were quite generic in comparison to other Silent Hill games. Way too much tunnel crouch walking.
- The Weight sections were tedious as hell. The AI for that enemy is awful. There were times where it wouldn't move for a few minutes because its routine would break. And then, depending on whether a certain objective parameter was met or not, it could just randomly teleport straight to your vicinity. Not to mention it's sporadic nature of charging around the place.
Overall, after 15 hours, I'm left with a pretty mixed experience. There are parts I loved, but there are some sections that really dragged the game down for me. And as someone that was very hyped prior to playing, I left with the feeling of having played a decent game. 7/10.