Wow, I haven't actually given my opinion about the game here. Shame on me! So here you get it! Minor spoilers around, big spoilers will be marked though. WALL OF TEXT!
Overall, I thought it was an okay game. It was entertaining, challenging and the gameplay wasn't as bad as some say. I still had problems with both the story and the gameplay from time to time.
Story: it started out pretty interesting. Alex returning to a desolate town creating an atmosphere. You start to meet characters, and start realizing something is wrong. The plot thickens and you start exploring the town. I liked how it started building up the story. Sadly I feel the characters in this game wasn't done a lot of justice and suffered from a similar mistake Silent Hill 4 made.
The characters hardly got any screen time before they died! This was one of the major parts I disliked about Silent Hill 4, you were introduced to a character and they then died almost right after with almost no characterization at all. Mayor Bartlett, Dr. Finch and Curtis hardly got anything. Judge Holloway got more but was still very bland. I felt it was just rather bad decision since I couldn't feel anything for some people I just saw. Elle was not as developed either, and felt like a normal damsel in distress and Wheeler was not as annoying as people make him out to be but didn't add much to the overall story.
Besides that I liked the way Alex' family was and loved how the secrets of the family was slowly revealed. I was not really blown away by the twist in the end though. It is normally a twist that is used in several movies and games these days. The biggest part of the story I disliked was
the entire cult thing. The biggest flaw is how the cult acted. The whole kidnap, torture, Saw/Hostel scenery felt out of place. How the entire town and the cult got the "movie" treatment wasn't very well-received for me either. Silent Hill was to me just a normal town with this cult doing illegal and morally wrong things behind the scenes. Here it felt like the Movie with survivors hiding somewhere from the monsters.
Silent Hill has always been influenced by many movies and it can normally be seen in the games. In this game the entire influence seems to come from Hostel and Saw though, both movies about extreme violence. I don't think this extreme violence fits Silent Hill. Sure we see bodies hanging around and disfigured or scary things but mostly we never saw the killing/mutilation happen. They were there to creep us out while here it feels like it's here to shock us. It didn't feel like it belonged here.
The endings, weren't really too interesting. They were all short and ended the story with no satisfying closure to the story.
Overall, I wasn't impressed with the story in it. It started out well but started going downhill as the game went on.
Gameplay: With a new combat system relying more on fighting you could fear it focussed too much on the action. I really didn't feel it was too overloaded with action. I liked this, it was hard in the beginning with some of the harder monsters to find the technique to defeat, such as the Needlers, Schisms and Siams (as for the creature design, it was fine. Kinda wished they'd gone for more original monster designs).
But I didn't like fighting cult members/humans for the last part of the game. That isn't how Silent Hill is. Yes, we fought against a few in other games but here we battled hordes of people trying to bash your brains out. Not something that fits here imo.
I liked the bosses though, they were challenging and had a system behind them you had to figure out.
There were problems in the combat system that appeared later on in the game for me. I didn't feel many of the close combat weapons were worth using. Most of the time they were too slow to use and you'd get mauled. So through the entire game I usually just used the knife/dagger which made the combats very linear and hurt the overall impression. I disliked the limited amount of ammo you could have. It prevented you from conserving ammo against bosses etc. but I guess they might have been too easy if you had more ammo than the normal amount.
Puzzles were really lacking sadly. I never felt there were some where I had to use my brain and many were merely grab and fetch quests and then there were some generic puzzle games. Not impressed.
I disliked the quicktime events and button mash moments. I do that in almost all games though so it's not that terrible here. I kinda disliked how the image of the A-button would appear when you could pick items up or open doors but this is really nitpicking...
The atmospheric part of the gameplay was not as well worked out as I had hoped. The flash light, I felt didn't work. I never felt it lighted up at all and I had to turn the game's brightness up to the max to even be able to see anything. And still then, the flash light lit just few feet in front of me making it almost worthless. The radio, I never felt was used a whole lot. Usually I could hear or see the monsters before the radio got loud enough and it just didn't creep me out for some reason.
Locations were fine. The sewers were a bit bland, and the apartments in Silent Hill wasn't as beautiful as in the second game where each room had a look or even personality of its own. The area I liked the most was probably the prison mostly because of the small notes and writing on the walls you could read about the prisoners. The Otherworld transition was as taken from the movie. I wasn't a fan of it but it was interesting to see it happen real-time (that happened only once or twice though?). The Otherworld wasn't as distinct from the different locations but I liked the weird health clinic even though it got a little old when you got down in the deeper floors.
I miss the files of old times. Files about old weird stories that has happened, diaries about perverts or people that has seen demons. It helped build an atmosphere and tell creepy stories.
The sound department was good. It wasn't as terrifying as in the older games but still good and some very atmospheric. Not a whole lot wrong here.
Finishing words (finally!): As I said before I didn't hate it as many people seemed to. It was an enjoyable game with a fighting system that was rewarding but with flaws that sadly made it a little boring as you played (could just be because I only used the most efficient weapon, the knife/dagger). I liked Alex and his family more than, say Henry but the other characters were uninteresting. The story wasn't very good but it was not entirely terrible. At times it feels like a Silent Hill game while at other times it feels like something else.
If I were to compare it to a previous Silent Hill title I'd say it is on par with Silent Hill 4. Silent Hill 4 had a more interesting story but worse gameplay and fighting system. Silent Hill Homecoming had a worse story but improved battle system. Both commit mistakes but are by no means bad games. Both are still under Silent Hill Origins and Silent Hill 1-3 and around the same place. I haven't played Shattered Memories.
If I were to give this a grade I'd give it a 6 or 7 out of 10. With the title Homecoming I had hoped we'd return home to a Silent Hill we all knew and loved. Instead we go to a different Silent Hill that has changed. It's not totally fair for the game because of the original games are so important to us but as a fan this game could be very much improved in several aspects.