The benefit of hindsight allows us to trace the origins of survival horror back to early iterations of its tenets such as Clock Tower and the unsuspecting Alone in the Dark, but it was Capcom who in 1996 gave the genre its name - and perhaps its game - with the great Resident Evil. Together with the PlayStation original, not to mention the so-called Director's Cut, a slight reworking for the Gamecube version and a belated port to Nintendo's DS, the franchise's debut stands as an experience that few gamers haven't yet shared. Now, far be it for this critic to take anything away from its then startling originality, nor to overlook its long term effect on the gaming landscape, but to me - and to many - its slouching zombies and unashamed campiness felt like a half-measure; more, some might say, like survival schlock than survival horror. Endlessly entertaining and important, absolutely, but cheap shocks and explicit blood spatter did not necessarily make Resident Evil the genuinely frightening game it purported to be.

Enter, then, a few years later, a subtler, creepier experience by half: Silent Hill. Upon the foundations laid by Capcom, Konami's Team Silent built a town where terror ruled supreme, where the simplest of events defied explanation and awful, unknowable things lurked around every corner, ready to scare you out of your skin as much as eviscerate you. Skinless foetuses, ethereal stalkers and shapely, bloodstained nurses shambled rampant around the fog-ridden streets of Silent Hill, although they were, in the end, the least of your worries. This, at last, was survival horror done right.

Somehow, Silent Hill 2 surpassed its predecessor, introducing so many of the staples of the sequels to come later. The extraordinary story of James Sunderland and his late wife remains with me nearly a decade after the fact; an ultimately tragic tale that each of the successive instalments in the franchise has tried to emulate - tried, and failed. To this day, Silent Hill 2 is remembered by the majority of survival horror aficionados as the very pinnacle of the genre, and however unfairly, it's the game against which all other efforts must be measured - up to and including this most recent iteration. It shouldn't come as any great surprise to veteran fans of the franchise that Silent Hill: Homecoming cannot quite scale the vertiginous heights of the sequel to end all sequels, but debut developer Double Helix do a very respectable, if rather obvious, job of aping the series' most memorable moments while at the same time breathing new life into the long-outmoded gameplay mechanics and technical limitations which had come to hold it back.

As with last year's PSP release, Silent Hill Origins, the renowned Team Silent are largely absent from proceedings behind the scenes, although it's a relief to see - or hear, I should say - that mainstay Akira Yamaoka remains onboard as executive producer and composer extraordinaire. Whether by his guiding hand, an in-depth understanding of the themes and motifs of the series to date or some alchemical concoction of the two, the atmosphere throughout the ten hour experience has lost little of its uniqueness; its unnerving, unknowable qualities are present and correct in ways I honestly hadn't expected. I was not, I'll admit, entirely immune to the anguished outcries of Silent Hill fans all over the internet when Konami announced Double Helix as the studio behind the next instalment of such a treasured piece of intellectual property, but rest easy: Homecoming is as faithful a follow-up as such things come. The new team, plucked from reputable but defunct developers The Collective and Shiny Entertainment, have a solid enough handle on the all-important mythology that sprinkled through the game there are more references and call-backs than even the most committed franchise fans will cotton onto in a single play through. Unfortunately, the developers' assured strength in this area also proves to be singularly the most problematic aspect of Homecoming. Too often, you see, the plot and the characters - so memorable in previous outings in and around Silent Hill - take a forgettable backseat to make room for all the inside-baseball showing off Double Helix can muster.

Take Alex Shepherd, a brooding war veteran in his late twenties and master of ceremonies for this current-gen debut. His experience in combat means he's not quite the everyman of previous games in the series - although this seems to be more a device to justify the improved encounter mechanics than for any narrative consideration - but in all other senses, Alex is a classic Silent Hill hero. Like Harry's adopted daughter and James' lost wife, his every move is made to advance a single-handed search for his missing younger brother, Josh. Coming home to Shepherd's Glen from an undisclosed stay in military hospital, he dreams that Josh is in grave danger, and upon arrival in the exceedingly familiar town, his mother confirms his fears. He's hell-bent for the rest of the game, quite literally at points, by the hunt, and though he stops to help a gaggle of tertiary characters - there's a policeman, a doctor, a judge, a mayor and an estranged childhood friend, each as unremarkable as the next - his every action is measured against the increasingly desperate pursuit he's prepared to lay down his life for.

All of this is well and good, but for anyone who's played through a previous Silent Hill game, it's unremarkable at best, and at worst, too familiar by half. Shades of what's come before are certainly acceptable, welcome even, but Alex rarely seems more than a minor rewrite and a palette swap away from any of the prior protagonists - particularly the execrable trucker of last year's Origins. He's voiced reasonably well but his dialogue is off-kilter and often painfully at odds with actual human speech. Still, this is Silent Hill we're talking about. The people there? Pretty messed up.

And my, they surely are, but that's really the extent of what you come to learn about the secondary cast for the first seven hours or so, despite the pivotal importance of a few when it comes to knotting plot-threads together. Things pick up considerably in the third act but the trip from title screen to endgame will be a tough one for newcomers who aren't already invested in the cultish canon that ten years of Silent Hill has wrought. It's a crying shame, really, because Homecoming is otherwise the perfect point of entry for players who've overlooked the series thus far. For one thing, the problematic tank controls typical of the survival horror genre have been completely overhauled - and would you look at that: in one fell swoop, all the contrary arguments that gamers and developers have made to support the clunky, prohibitive player interaction of the past are resolved. Movement is infinitely more natural on the left stick, not to mention much less finicky, while the camera, now neatly positioned a few feet behind Alex and largely, joyfully free of the issues associated with that particular decision, resides on the right side of your controller. It's still a way from Gears of War-esque fluidity, certainly, but it works, and damn near unerringly; for its commendable - if a few sequels overdue - choice, Homecoming is a decidedly better game. It'll take dyed-in-the-wool fans a little longer to adjust to the lack of fixed camera angles than the revamped control scheme, but that change, too, is for the better. It's markedly more satisfying, say, to come across some unspeakable stain seeping from inside a locked toilet stall when you spot it on your own reconnaissance rather than having your attention drawn to it directly by a more obnoxious camera than even Metal Gear Solid auteur Hideo Kojima dared to take advantage of.

Then there are the new and improved mechanics of combat. Thanks ostensibly to Alex's experience in the army, you're vastly more adept at dealing with the horrors that come lurching out of Shepherd's Glen and Silent Hill's pervasive fog-wall. Eventually you have a choice of three melee weapons and three firearms. There's a knife, a steel pipe and an axe; a pistol, a shotgun and a rifle. You can't upgrade the weapons in your inventory per se, but you can replace each of them with more powerful equivalents later in the game. In any case, the right bumper brings up a weapon-select wheel, from which a quick tap in any direction equips the appropriate arms, and from there on out, it only gets better. Ammo is sparse, even on normal mode, and at the hardest difficulty - where there are less items lying around and enemies have noticeably more health - you hardly have the chance to fire a gun before it's out of bullets. In that event, and my, there are a lot of them, you're presented with two choices: either run like hell or rely on melee combat. In Silent Hill's past, a combination of imprecise control and dreadfully slow player characters meant that your course of action was clear. In Homecoming, either option is as valid as the other. Enemies pursue you further and faster than before but if you're smart about it you can still outrun them - or cheat and nip through a door or up a ledge; a few tweaks to the AI aside, they're far from the cleverest monsters you'll meet. Whip out a melee weapon, on the other hand, and you can see just how capable Alex is: he can execute both light and charged attacks with the A and the X buttons, and by mixing the two types together you can pull off a reasonable selection of combos. Oh, and he can dodge.

I know, dodging in a Silent Hill game - and blocking! It's all a little hard to believe, really, empowering in a way that you wouldn't expect a survival horror game to allow, but regardless of all the superficial renovations, Homecoming remains resolutely of its genre. It doesn't betray its roots in the sense that the last, action-packed Resident Evil did, and Resident Evil 5 - judging from the lacklustre demo and the negative early buzz - looks to compound. Whether we've sleight-of-hand or technical wizardry to thank, Double Helix has systematically addressed an age-old compendium of complaints about previous entries in the series without sacrificing that which it was - that which made it so in the first place. As with the grand, defining tradition of survival horror, you are still outnumbered and very much outmatched; you'll only stand a chance of making it if you know when to run and when to stand your ground and fight for little lost Josh.

Crucially, Homecoming is easily one of the scariest Silent Hill sequels to date and not shock-horror kind of scary, but the kind of creeping fear that starts in your stomach and rises within you like bile. Around the midpoint of the game, for instance, after a particularly gruelling encounter with a new enemy type that I had no idea how to defeat, I'd spent all my ammo and wasted all the precious health drinks I'd been hoarding for just such a hopeless moment. Then, as though there were some sadistic director a la Left 4 Dead just waiting for the chance to mess with me, the air-raid sirens sounded, the broken down textures of the town turned to rust and blood and sharp edges, my trusty radio started to clamour with whispers of static in my ear, and I ran. For maybe half an hour, I ran, completely turned around and blind to everything but the threats I had to dodge from everywhere around me. And as I ran, into the dark, and the fog - and I'm man enough to acknowledge, not a few monsters, either - an incredible electro-industrial piece by the outstanding Akira Yamaoka started to play over the hiss of interference and the excruciating fingernails-on-chalkboard sound of the horrifying Needlers and Lurkers too close for me to even turn around and get a bead on. I kept running, of course, and only when I'd hit a rare load screen entirely by accident and run a little further did I dare peek behind me to be absolutely sure I was alone. Then the hissing started again, followed swiftly by the arrival of another of those godforsaken beasts that I'd wasted all my items on in the first place. So I got my bearings, steeled myself... and started running in the direction I'd come. An unquestionably terrifying half hour of survival horror at its very height.

There are, of course, problems but none are so crucial that they obstruct good, old-fashioned gameplay in any real sense. Wall-mounted save points are back but you're no longer forced to sit through stretches of already somewhat repetitive gameplay just to have another go at a tricky boss. There are checkpoints and continues as well as game over screens, not that you'll see too many of the latter on the default difficulty. The fog, too, for all I understand its effectiveness, its oppressiveness, started to grate on me some, especially in those occasional, wide open, interior environments where the graphics engine can strut its mighty stuff. The grain filter and film effects may also prove a little hard for some to swallow - most of the other current-gen games to have employed such cinematic trickery at least gave players the opportunity to ratchet around a few sliders. Not so in Homecoming - a brightness bar is the best you can hope for - although given the atmospheric imperative, it's perhaps an understandable restriction.

Graphically, Homecoming is gorgeous. It is, first and foremost, a very dark game, in tone as well as in more literal terms, but the efficacy of Double Helix's bar-raising use of bloom and high-dynamic range lighting should only be overlooked at other developers' peril. The start-up studio's environmental texture work, too, is solid, and especially impressive considering that many of the areas have been artworked in two significantly different conditions. The animations are acceptable, if a little stiff, and though some of the facial modelling is downright ugly, it's all in-engine, all the time, and that's an inspiring feat in any game. The real strength of the engine finally hits you in full when you watch the astonishing transitions between the standard Silent Hill and its patented hell-state; when the nerve-shattering siren sounds and the walls around you peel back to reveal all manner of perversity that was hidden just a moment before. The first such phasing, just as you're about the meet the Mayor of Shepherd's Glen, was a showcase piece through the later previews of Homecoming, and it's truly a sight to see - sadly, it's also the only occasion where you're in control of Alex as the environment transitions. It's a shame that the frame-rate stutters when things get busy; even with the game installed to the 360's hard drive, there's definite chugging when you turn too fast or if there are too many visible light sources for the engine to render in at once.

Homecoming is by no means half-baked, but you get the feeling, from time to time, that it could have done with another month in development to iron out some of the little issues that crop up throughout the experience. Alex gets wet often enough that in this hardware generation it's nigh-inexcusable to see him stepping out of the sewers or some filthy, waist-deep water without temporarily discoloured trousers or even a footprint to immerse players more firmly in the game world. There are long moments when the difficulty seems to ramp up out of nowhere too, extended periods during which you have nothing to heal with and the notion of an offensive tack is the last thing on your mind. There are occasional audio glitches where the atmospheric score drops out without even a token fade, and the soundtrack itself is excellent, if not quite on par with Yamaoka's previous efforts - but then, with Double Helix behind the wheel, the maestro is hardly involved in the same capacity as before and it's hard to hold the lack of a real thematic standout against him, especially when considering how perfectly creepy the ambient soundscape is otherwise.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is no queen, then, but there's more than enough about Double Helix's first go-around with the series that I can heartily recommend it to any gamer with an appetite for a genuinely creepy hybrid of survival horror old and new. It is well designed and beautifully presented, casting off just enough of the old constraints to feel relevant again. Bringing such a beloved franchise into an irrevocably changed gaming landscape without negating that which made it so important in the first place must surely have been a fine line for the developers to tread - and given that, no wonder Homecoming plays it safe in some respects - but Double Helix has done enough to retain the atmosphere and the essential feel of Silent Hills past that, in the end, they tread that line just fine. And make no mistake: with Resident Evil's self-professed designs on Gears of War, this is the last triple-A franchise the genre has left. How incredibly gratifying to see it live on not just in our memories, but in a modern game that's more than equal to its great name.

Reviewed by Niall Rough for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).