Silent Hill is regarded as a landmark title, breaking the conventions of the time and defining the horror genre in its own terms. With recent entries in the franchise having been met with little acclaim, Downpour is the latest attempt to bring the Silent Hill name back to its former glory.

Murphy Pendleton is involved in a road accident whilst being transferred between prisons after he brutally murdered a fellow inmate. Surviving the crash with little injury he finds himself in the titular town and a deadly fight for survival and escape ensues. The immediate danger comes from the occasional monster lurking in the fog and having to use improvised weapons to hold them off, but things start to escalate when Murphy realises that the town is not what it appears and escape seems impossible.

Slowly being fed snippets of information about Murphy's past help to patch together the back plot for you, not least of which is the reason for his incarceration. This are mostly done via an in-game diary which collates the scraps of letters and police reports you find scattered throughout the town as well as flashbacks and visual clues.

Whatever his reasons you do get to make a few moral choices along the way to guide Murphy to one of the six possible game endings. These choices don't affect the game direction, however, and you do feel that whatever choice you make is having no effect. More concerning is how these moral decisions are in quite bad taste; not content with giving you a "help" or "don't help" option, developers Vatra Games decided that these options could be a little more extreme and in one situation actually give you the opportunity to taunt a man into committing suicide. Nice.

This isn't the worst of Downpour's problems though. For a game that tries its best to force you into combat the actual mechanics of this are astoundingly poor. Using improvised melee weapons like crowbars, chairs, bricks, bottles and the like is a nice touch, as too is that these weapons will degrade and eventually break if used too often. Where it fails is that swinging these weapons feels cumbersome and slow and you're never entirely sure if you will connect with your target. This leaves you open to attack, which always staggers you, as does blocking (and there is no "dodge" move). All of which makes you wonder why you bother fighting at all. In fact, there is an achievement for completely avoiding combat as well as one of the endings depending on how few kills you rack up. It seems that the developers realised that avoiding combat is the best solution for all concerned.

"Run away" is the order of the day then. Except that Murphy can't seem to run, or jump, or do a lot of other simple things. Indeed Murphy is a man with a mysterious past, a man with eyes that are just a little too close together, a man who walks like he's had a trouser accident and a man that can't run faster than a brisk walking pace even when his life literally depends on it. This aversion to sprinting becomes a real headache during the few visits to the otherworld, the Hellish alternate Silent Hill that has drawn Murphy in. Disappointingly, these sections (which surely should be the centrepieces of the game) boil down to solving a simple puzzle and then a chase around a maze.

Aside from trying to escape, Murphy can decide to let himself get involved in a number of side quests around the town. Mostly these are simple fetch and return tasks but they do add a little more depth to the game and help pad out the fairly lean central storyline. All of these can easily be avoided (or genuinely missed) and as only one of them can affect the outcome of the game they are really only there for completionists and those brave enough to tackle a second play through.

Visually, Downpour is quite unattractive. I have no issue with a 'drab' colour palette, if that is the design that suits the game, but murky textures and chunky character models have no excuse. Worse than that is the horrendous amount of texture pop-in and cripplingly bad frame rate problems that seem to plague the game from start to end. When a game looks this average but can't maintain a steady frame rate you have to wonder what is going on.

Downpour has some moments that are genuinely well thought out but the whole experience cannot be described as enjoyable or entertaining. The limited range of enemies, the simplistic plot (which you'll have figured out before the tutorial section has even finished), the dreadful combat, underwhelming graphics and terrible technical problems all combine to make it a washout.