KylieDog

User Score
4.0

Presentation - 5.0
Gameplay - 3.0
Value - 5.0

Being a long term survival horror fan and also a fan of the Silent Hill series I had high hopes for Shattered Memories, it seems the creators have no idea what made past games good though because none of what was great about past games is present.

The use of the Wiimote to point your flashlight and an average predictable story are the only real highlights of the game and certainly do not make up for its faults.

The fact the enemies run faster than you can in a game you get no weapons is horribly balanced enough without the enemies grabbing you when you're not even near them, it is like they just teleport onto your back from several feet away. Terrible design in such an important part of the game.

To shake them off you need do this overly large lunge of both the wiimote and nunchuck off the screen to the side or off the bottom, its hard to tell which because it only tells you on screen which way you need do it sometimes (randomly?), the other times you need to guess and if you guess wrong more than once you'll probably die before you figure out what was right.  A good chance you'll guess right and it just will not recognise the motion input instead, though you have no idea if this is the problem or you just guessed wrong.  Why a simple waggle of the wiimote was not deemed sufficent I do not know, but what is in place is just horrible.

Of course this lunging the pointer off screen even if it does shake the enemy off then ruins your ability to run away because the IR pointer is used to turn and you just aimed it off screen.  So you aim it back on screen again but it takes a small bit of time to recognise that and return turning control over to you again, so by the time you are able to turn and run away there is a good 50/50 chance you've been grabbed by another enemy and need repeat the entire process over.

What makes it even more annoying is the entire time you got this mind numbing tone screaming out of the wiimote speaker along with lots of white/static noise, that alone is enough to make me want to turn the game off.  It wasn't nearly so penetrating in older games and you had the ability to turn it off also, no such luck here.

The game also looks terrible graphically on a HDTV (used for playing for this mini-review), I use a HDTV with Wii in EDTV mode for all Wii gaming and plenty of Wii games look fine on it.  Shattered Memories looks like a graphically decent game that has been beat up run through the mud, quite a few games have this issue when played on a HDTV but many do not, so I find fault to be placed in the game rather than the hardware used to play it.

Other things I notice is the the game world isn't very interactive and by that I mean aside from a specific item you need you cannot examine anything like you could in older Silent Hill games.  It makes the world seem very false.   No real searching for anything like in older games either, if you find a locked door you are happy to know the key or button to unlock it is usually within 10ft of where the door is, probably inside the only thing in the area you can interact with.  This is the poorest type of puzzle/exploration, barely qualifying.

The game is also very linear, usually only ever one place to go at a time except when running from enemies when you'll probably be able to run in circles throughout sevaral rooms or small areas before finding an exit.

A below average game made even worse by terrible use of motion controls.