Alan Wake review.
Intro and Influential Information
Platform: 360
Money Paid for Game: Free rental
When I got it: 2 months after release
Well I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I got hold of this. I knew it was from the Max Payne people so my expectations were quite high for obvious reasons. In a nutshell Alan Wake is a survival horror game, something I am a huge fan of and also something that hasn’t come across in a good long while now. However, I really can’t see why this game took so long to come out, the overall result does not warrant the extremely long development cycle this time around like Max Payne did many moons ago.
Story / Characters
Right this section will be short and sweet. You play as Alan Wake, a writer who goes on holiday with his wife to bright falls for some relaxation. Immediately things go wrong and you awake in a crashed car with a week missing from your memory and your wife is missing.
I really don’t need to say much more as the story is definitely the driving force behind the game. Without ruining anything, the story is very well told and serves as adequate motivation to move you from once place to the next.
Presentation
Alan Wake is all about the creepy forest. Seriously, the woodland town setting is perfect for throwing you into dense foggy, spooky forests in the middle of the night filled with axe wielding goons.
The graphics really don’t leave anything to be desired other than variety. As amazing as the creepy dark forests are, it would have been great to see that level of atmosphere used in a different environment. Alan Wake really is one of those games where atmosphere goes a long way to keep you playing.
Sound is not quite the same though, weapon effects seem a little unfulfilling and some of the voice acting is either corny as hell or just plain bad. The best thing regarding the audio is the manic dialogue the taken enemies will come out with as they’re chasing you.
Gameplay
The interesting part...
From a purely mechanical point of view Alan Wake is a third person shooter. It has over the shoulder gunplay like RE4 has and you can move while shooting. There is no melee attack though, health regenerates and the checkpoints are plentiful.
The overall action centres around using your trusty torch to burn away the darkness that protects the taken and then you can attack their physical form. This is the only way in which you’ll be able to take down enemies with conventional means, therefore the core action can get fairly repetitive, but there is something really satisfying about the rhythm of burning them with your torch then shooting them. You also get more powerful weapons to use such as flares, flash bang grenades and a flare gun. These kill most enemies instantly while the flares burn away shields very quickly.
You only get a handful of standard survival horror weapons, but combined with the darkness mechanic these simple weapons manage to create enjoyable combat that never really gets dull. There is also a dodge mechanic, however this is pretty random and doesn’t always work.
Difficulty wise the normal setting is well balanced and is ideal for your first run. The higher modes take the usual approach these days of just increasing damage done to you and significantly decreasing the damage you can inflict, the darkness takes a lot longer to burn away too. The collision detection can be pretty bad sometimes, this is only a real problem on the nightmare (very hard) difficulty as getting hit has a huge penalty and when the attack doesn’t actually hit you it can get pretty annoying.
The game is split up into episodes (which function as levels) and these are presented as they would be in a TV drama. This is very well done and every episode creates a good cliff-hanger style ending that makes you want to come back.
There are also a billion collectibles scattered around the game, some of which add to the story and the history of bright falls. These could distract certain people from the main plot but the sheer number of them is just unnecessary and less is more when going for this kind of thing.
Replay Value
There’s not much to do once all is said and done as the story of the game is main reason to go through it. Depending on the type of person you are the collectibles will add some extra time to the experience.
I can’t shake the feeling that something is missing from Alan Wake. I was expecting this game to offer far more play time than it eventually did (if you skip all the cut scenes and collectibles you can easily complete it in less than four hours), I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it, because I really did. I was just hoping for more of it, and I don’t mean in terms of length. I just hoped for more enemies, weapons and more variation on the gameplay and locations. Anyway, if nothing else... thank you Remedy for making a survival horror game and showing that they can still be done right.
