Silent Hill 4 is a truly beautiful looking game, with an engine able to render realistic environments and awesomely detailed characters. Once you have entered a room, Silent Hill 4 can show an amount of details that few other console games can offer. Anyhow, the technology powering the experience is old, as Silent Hill 4 doesn't look too different from Silent Hill 2. This isn't bad, as Silent Hill 2 is one of the most beautiful looking games on this generation of consoles, but some of the engine limits are well behind nowadays standards.

The main problem is that every time you enter a room the game must load the data for some seconds; it would have been probably difficult to create a graphics engine able to stream the data off the disk like most solid adventure games released in the last months, mainly because of the crazy level of detail found in each room. Loading times occur often also within the same locales; for example, in the subway, while walking along the corridors the game will often stop to load, breaking your exploration. Background or objects animations are also non existent, leaving aside a couple of big machineries you will find in the levels of the game; so, for example, if you want to open a fridge, the game will turn black, load for a second, and show you the room with the opened fridge. Needless to say this looks and feels extremely outdated in this generation of videogames. It's also worth noticing that Silent Hill 4 is the first game of the series showing some hiccups here and there, at least in the PlayStation 2 version. This happened probably because unlike all past games of the series, Silent Hill 4 was designed for a simultaneous PlayStation 2 and Xbox release. You will notice many slowdowns (but nothing that goes against the gameplay), and slightly less sharp textures. The texture work in Silent Hill 4 is still amazing, but confronting this game with Silent Hill 3 one can notice a loss in quality.

The background design in the game is more repetitive than in past games of the series; there is less variety, also because there are basically just five different places you will be visiting in the game. These include all the clichés created by past games of the series - there is a nasty prison/orphanage (the most evocative and original of the game's levels), a subway station, a forest, a strange building with shops, and Henry's apartments building. The atmosphere is weak, because the game, leaving aside a couple of sadly isolated moments of pure brilliance, is very predictable and very uniform; instead of showing the alternation of normal world/dark world seen in past Silent Hill games, all the places in Silent Hill 4 are decaying and covered with dirt. Only in the ending section of the game you will see hell breaking loose and turning your surroundings in a living nightmare, even if Silent Hill 4 never reaches the stylistic excesses of Silent Hill 3.

A separate team worked on the apartment design. Henry's place is very small, but during the adventure you will see many disgusting things happening in "The Room"; like faces appearing in the walls, pulsating veins, strange photos, and many more. The design of these phenomenons is amazing - probably only Silent Hill 3 showed such grisly, maniacally designed details.

The main characters, Henry in particular, are well designed and built with a wonderful attention to detail; hair and clothes look great, and textures used for the skin of the characters make the virtual people of Silent Hill 4 look just real. Animations are good, even if some are not convincing. Eileen, Henry's neighbor, moves too much like a duck to look like a real person; similarly, a few of Henry's animations, for example when he's running, look bizarrely hilarious.

Enemy design is disappointing. The much advertised giant bird with human arms and two baby heads is the most convincing enemy of the game, together with giant humanoid creatures that seems taken from Silent Hill 2. The most common enemies are unfortunately ridiculous - the usual zombie dogs (I can't stand them anymore) and flying insects are by far the most common creatures you will be dealing with in Silent Hill 4, and that doesn't work exactly in the direction of creating a strong atmosphere. But no enemy is as ridiculous and as uninspiring as the new gorilla zombies that come complete with monkey sounds - I'm sure the developers included them to add a humorous touch to the otherwise dull world of Silent Hill 4.

As I said, ghosts feel like a missed opportunity. The most common ghosts look like boring floating zombies, but with some exceptions. The first boss ghost you will encounter, seen also in the trailer of the game, shows some crazy, twisted, beautiful animation; the ghosts (or demons, I don't know) coming out of the walls look also gorgeous and disgusting at the same time, resembling the best humanoid creatures of past games of the series. If the design of some of these creatures is very good, the developers made a too heavy use of them to make you really feel fear - ghosts will soon become just another of the monsters of the game, just more annoying, because you can't kill them.

The cool noise filter of past installments is back in Silent Hill 4, but the developers give you the possibility to turn it off in the options menu. Actually, the options menu gives you the chance to customize a lot of minor stuff. You can change blood color, just in case you feel like zombies should have green liquid in their veins, you can turn head motion on/off in first person view, you can hide the life gauge and item icons on the screen.

Akira Yamaoka has done wonders in past Silent Hill games, and Silent Hill 4 is still a quite unique experience for the player's ears. The beautiful introductory guitar theme and the emotional main song of the game are basically the only pieces of what we commonly describe as "music" you will be hearing during the game.

Silent Hill 4, like and more than any other game of the series, is built on the fusion of in-game sound effects with additional layers of distorted, fastidious sounds that unnerve the player. Classic sound effects are also used often in a unique, unrealistic way. My favorite example occurs later in the game, when you call a number from a phone in a room and you start hearing a phone ringing somewhere in the building. The phone will keep ringing until you find it, and this can take some time, but you will hear it always at same volume - soon the ringing of the phone, which follows you everywhere, will get into your head, unnerving you to the point of filling you with a sort of rage that makes this simple "find the phone" quest strangely upsetting. You will hate the sound artists of Silent Hill 4 in this and many other moments, but that's exactly what they wanted.

Despite this originality, Silent Hill 4's sounds are, with my own surprise, less refined and more repetitive than in any other game of the series. Different monsters produce exactly the same sounds when you kill them, footsteps doesn't sound real, firearms sounds are dull - it seems like the sound artists took the time to develop some great crazy ideas and used a generic library of sounds for the rest of the game.

Voice acting occurs less often than in past games of the series, as cutscenes in Silent Hill 4 are but a few, but it's as excellent as usual. Great actors, great voices that fit the characters perfectly, and simple but decent dialogues.

It took us about 12 hours to complete the game, but we explored almost every single room and killed hundreds and hundreds of monsters. Silent Hill 4 is longer than Silent Hill 3, but it's also a more repetitive game. You will have to play the same levels twice, and the lack of puzzles coupled with the stupid gameplay can occasionally make you think, "Why exactly am I playing this game?" Anyhow, Silent Hill 4 has four different endings and a few nice unlockable extras that could make some masochist fan of the series play the game again once you he has completed it.