This game absolutely rules, when you can play it. Looking past the abysmal server issues at launch, likely attributable to an unpredictably enormous debut, this game delivers. It is bombastic and has a polished gameplay loop. It is hilarious in its incessant parody of militaristic expendability and feverous patriotism. Most critically, it delivers emergent gameplay moments in spades.

Although fun in solo play, it is much better to engage with an outstandingly cooperative community of strangers or your friends when delivering managed democracy in Helldivers II. The game's dynamism is amplified by the presence of other players. Team kills, coordinated airstrikes, team reloads and a hug on the battlefield all color the cooperative experience.

There is a shocking amount of gameplay diversity that derives from a robust ordinance ("strategem") system and a good spread of mission designs. Whether it be the hectic nests of a Terminid planet or hordes of Automatons marching towards you out of a jungle's tree-line, there is a filmic nature to nearly every encounter. In my 35+ hours in game (with other hours of my 46 total in servers queues), there were some hysterical exploits of the physics-system and harrowing escapes from certain doom that had us laughing or cheering for hours on end. There is irresistible charm in the parody at play here, whether it be a rag dolling player flying through the sky yelling "LIBERTYYYY" or the cheeky combat tips you get between missions. There are many such examples. Add in some crisp shooting, both 1st and 3rd person, and you have a hell of an experience here. Truly, taking out alien and robotic hordes with your pals has never been so damned cool.

The joy of hectic co-op missions - where you're just as likely to die to a friendly mortar as an enemy rocket - is only stifled by a progression model that becomes punitive in the late game and the ludicrous frequency of glitches, the latter of which is mostly confined to the downtime between games. You are just as likely to run into an enormous bug in the missions as you are in the menus. With no glitches, though, it's a great game. The developers deserve a ton of praise for nailing the actual experience of playing at any given moment. Guns and explosions sound great, and all the things that could be a real nuisance in a game like this are balanced so well that they're never a concern - guns have just enough recoil to make it worth some attention, ammo and stamina feel plentiful as long as you're being somewhat mindful, you get the idea. When combined with the number of stratagems (providing airstrikes, additional equipment, and turrets from the sky) and equipment options, you can easily drop into a mission with a loadout that ensures you will never ever have to think about ammo, or about watching your back, or about dealing with heavily-armored enemies.

The difficulty, though, ramps up pretty steadily until you're constantly bottoming out on your "plentiful" ammo and stamina, with the cooldowns on those airstrikes becoming excruciatingly long despite the fact that they never actually changed. In terms of the actual effect this has on team strategy and camaraderie, it's up there with the best - it's hard to mind that your pal's airstrike nearly killed you when it saved you from five other things competing for the honor. A teammate finding the time to call in a much-needed resupply as everything is going to shit will make them your real-life hero.

Comparing this to similar shooters will undoubtedly let some folks down as the smaller (but still important) differences in strategic flavor between games can be a turn-off. For one thing, the game is very quick to throw out the periodic lulls in the action that are common in games like L4D, PD2, and DRG - unlock the first of 6 new difficulty levels and you'll find that lingering slightly too long in a level can put you in a situation where enemies are permanently spawning faster than you can kill them as your team starts hemorrhaging their limited revives. Helldivers is also rather generous in that all of your stratagems are very good as long as you actually tailor them to the situation, but part of the cost is that you have to immobilize yourself and enter between 3 and 9 directional inputs without making a mistake, and then throw a beacon that actually places the thing. This is how you call in the extraction shuttle, this is how you summon more ammo, this is how your friends are telling you to revive them as you dive into a crater with rockets flying past your head. Some people are going to hate this more than their actual job, I think it's fantastic. Part of the fantasy is becoming so good at entering these codes that you barely have to stop moving at all to get the entire team back in action, and finding these small windows to call in support contributes strongly to the impression of constant enemy pressure, but also to the satisfaction of actually pulling it off once the mission's over.

With a full squad, there are 4 different perspectives on a mission that all share the broad strokes but each of which has different details. A teammate's attempt to save one of your comrades from being maimed by a building-sized bug may not notice that they just gave you a haircut with a ricocheted autocannon projectile. A dead teammate who checks their phone for texts likely didn't see that the effort to bring them back involved a creatively used stim, a head-first dive off a cliff, and a respawn beacon tossed over a crowd of enemies as you draw the horde away from them. The team chuckles at the idea of throwing down a minefield behind you to cover your tracks, but only the player who deploys it will notice that they've killed an entire enemy dropship without firing a shot. A teammate operating the terminal at one of the objectives can't tell that your efforts to cover them involve frantically switching guns as you mag-dump at a horde of silhouettes through thick, black smoke. Everyone completed the same mission, but there's still plenty of clever and hilarious details to discuss once you arrive back at the destroyer. Including the other consequences of that minefield.

Silent Hill: Short Message was a short but nice experience that allowed us to re-experience the P.T atmosphere that remained in our culture. Being a walking simulator and not having many mechanics, it gave it more of an interactive game feel, but since P.T. has a similar atmosphere, I can't judge it too much. The game consists of 3 chapters, and in each chapter, it offers a scenario that includes beautiful messages in which the main character repeatedly experiences the traumas and psychological distress she experienced with his environment and friends and seeks salvation. Some of the parts I didn't like were that the phone could have been more interactive and useful. It was also a bit disappointing that the game didn't mention Silent Hill much and only made a few references through notes. Although the chase sequences in the game are sometimes reactionary, they become repetitive and lose their impact. And it was a poor choice that the atmosphere of fear that the game provided to the player was limited to this. In essence, Silent Hill is a series that stands out with psychological horror, but I couldn't see much of this in the gameplay part. But apart from this, the graphics and lightning was top-notch. In conclusion, Silent Hill: Short Message has a nice and serious scenario that highlights the important problems that lead young people to suicide, such as traumas, lack of self-confidence and social problems, and it is a short and pleasant experience with the atmosphere of P.T. Could it be better? Maybe, but even the fact that the game was released for free was a pleasant surprise from Konami. I hope the Silent Hill games that will come with Silent Hill 2 Remake will be successful.

So, ehm, this was my entry point in the Silent Hill franchise. Not a good one indeed, but i know there's a lot for me to explore.

About this "The Short Message"... the atmosphere was nice, and that's it. The explorable areas are the same rooms with the same assets, making the chasing sections very confusing and annoying. And there are like just two or three actual gameplay sections: you'll spend the majority of time just walking and reading stuff.
Also, my biggest fear revealed itself as the truth: the plot is just dull retoric moralist stuff about suicide and social anxiety, exposed without a bit of originality.
Don't spend two hours on this if you have something better to do.

I have put maybe an hour or two into Silent Hill 2, and I know it's a game that I need to finish at some point. I know the great twist, I've had that spoiled for me god knows how many times. I honestly put it into the same camp that I have movies like Alien in: even if there's something in there that surprises me, having the big moments ripped off like a band-aid purely through pop culture osmosis dampers my curiosity somewhat. All of this is to say, while you may not personally be excited for new Silent Hill games, I'm just curious to see something new. Since I was only really around for P.T. once that was spoiled for me, too, I'm not counting it—which leaves me with the newly released The Short Message.

I did not get the hate that this got over its leaks, and having finally played it, I still don't. Having seen those leaks, I actually have more of an appreciation for this; I know now that this was pretty cohesive in its themes and intention when it needed it to be and never deviated from that. I don't mind a lack of subtlety, as long as the bluntness of what you're working on is there for a good reason, and I found the reasoning for it here to be acceptable. It's laser-focused on what it wants and needs to say from beginning to end, and this focus is echoed throughout the spaces you explore. Although I can see someone being a little irritated that this is linear to the point where doors don't unlock unless you read certain notes, most of those notes serve the story and not the lore. There are notes that serve the lore, but they all feed you the right amount of information while giving you space to think. What impressed me on an immediate level were the cinematics. I genuinely can't tell if they were live-action or rendered, although I know that they were likely rendered. It's uncanny as hell, but it's equally impressive. What impressed me throughout, however, is how well this serves as a mood piece. Each and every location, whether it was important or minor, made me feel something. This is more of a vibes game than something substantive or scary, and while that might be disappointing if you're going in expecting serious scares, it kept me hooked. One concern I do have, if this is the playable teaser many are making it out to be, is that the only area where I noticed evident performance issues was when I was near fog. If the new Silent Hill games are all going to lack the fog or run like shit because of it, we might be in for a doozy. But regardless of that one scene, the rest of this was pretty solid! ...for the most part.

Yeah, those chase scenes, man. I'm a little biased because I already don't like chase scenes, but something about them here felt either like filler or downright infuriating to deal with. If it weren't for the last chase sequence, my rating for this would absolutely be three-and-a-half stars because the vibes were just that immaculate for me. But no, god, no. I don't know if I ever want to go through that again. Put it this way: the game doesn't make a big deal about which rooms you go into because of its linear trajectory until the final chase sequence, where it expects you to remember the layout of the map like the back of your hand while elements of it feel completely different. It expects you to find five photographs in this mess without giving you a map or checkpoints. At a certain point, the stress I was intended to feel gave way to frustration. The only reason I didn't stop playing there was because I wanted to see the ending. That was it. The ending was nice, and there was a cute little tune that played over the credits (way more people worked on this than any other free game I've ever played), but I don't think that forgives it. It was that bad. At least the creature design was cool, though—although I found it to be scarier in the leaked concept art than I did in the final product. Consequences of having that kind of stuff leak, I guess. Whoops! Feel bad for the developers on that front, because I'm probably not alone in that.

What I liked about this, I really liked. If a new Silent Hill game is made from this mold, I wouldn't mind, actually. The Silent Hill 2 remake being a horror game that needs to have a trailer dedicated to its combat should say something about how skeptical I am of that, but I might also check it out when it's on sale. If this and that trailer is Konami's way of getting people back on the Silent Hill hype train... I mean, I wouldn't call this embarrassing. This was cool. But, 7/10.

Mucha tralla en las dos horas que dura. Silent Hill trata de repetir la jugada de PT con sus bucles espaciales, mecánicas minimalistas y la estrategia de lanzarlo por sorpresa, pero ha encontrado aquí buenos elementos de una nueva identidad visual y conceptual. La temática colegial y la imaginería de las flores me dice también que, de la misma forma que lo era PT, The Short Message es posiblemente una introducción al universo de Silent Hill f.

Más allá de eso, esto de demo no tiene nada. Cuenta una historia completa y se alarga jugablemente lo que se tiene que alargar y no más (más juegos cortos por favorrrrrrrr os lo pido). La saga busca nuevos horizontes en el drama juvenil, y aunque es mucho más obvio de lo que me gustaría y hay mucho trauma apegotonado junto de forma algo torpe, hay también decisiones brillantes. La dirección visual es de caerte de la silla y tiene una personalidad muy única, y la narrativa se guarda un par de ases bajo la manga bastante efectivos. La jugabilidad abusa quizás un pelín más de la cuenta de puzles espaciales obtusos, pero honestamente, no es nada remotamente cerca a algunas de las decisiones que tomó Kojuma por las que se le aplaudió.

Tras el tráiler tan pocho del remake de SH2 (mostrado la misma noche que esto), The Short Message es el rayo de luz que necesitaba para seguir teniendo algo de esperanza por el futuro de Silent Hill. Le falta finura para acercarse a PT o al trabajo del Team Silent, pero desde luego está más cerca de eso que de los otros destrozos que se han hecho en esta saga.