Silent Hill: Downpour for Xbox 360 Reviews by Gamers

I will start off saying that I love the Silent Hill franchise. Despite their shortcomings, they were always one of the few fun games that I could play together with my wife (I do the battles, she does the puzzles and exploring). This game started off great, excellent graphics, decent storyline, a little clunky combat...but whatever.

We quickly discovered a VERY huge oversight...the save system. The game shows a "Saving" icon literally every few minutes, however it is not actually saving your game progress. The game only saves at predetermined points, and there are surprisingly few for a game that requires you to explore numerous locations and solve lengthy puzzles. Normally, this isn't too big of a deal, but in this case it destroys the game due to the CONSTANT freezing. We would play the game for an hour, then it would freeze up. We would reload it only to find it hadn't saved any of our progress (despite seeing the "Saving" icon dozens of times). We would try to get back to where we were only to have it FREEZE again. Sometimes it would freeze just trying to load our game after the last freeze.

The combination of unfathomable freezing and lack of save points literally rendered the game unplayable for us. We gave it our best efforts and replayed the same parts over and over (and over) just praying for the next save point. It's unbelievable that in this day and age that a) a game doesn't have a decent autosave and b) a game can get out the door with such inherent glitches. We tried the game on multiple systems with the same results, and other games worked fine. It was extremely frustrating and disappointing, as the game was shaping up to be very entertaining.

If you're considering this game, and you like Silent Hill games, this one has great potential. If you're lucky enough to not encounter the freezing issues, you may have a good experience. However we were not so lucky and my pregnant wife was 2 seconds away from chucking it out the wi