It kinda lacks memorable characters, too. You play a writer that finds out that his stories, seemingly, have come to life, and that he’s hunted by a mysterious Darkness all the while trying to decipher the power behind his own writing.īut the problem is that even disregarding the problems (more on them in a bit) the story being OKAY or SERVICABLE is not enough to rescue the game from it’s faults, in my opinion. It wasn’t horrible or anything (although it was a bit contrived, and maybe didn’t make a whole lot of sense, more on that in a spoiler bit a moment later), but it was okay. Maybe the game could have been redeemed by a great, groundbreaking story.īut it kinda wasn’t. The cars control badly and are generally poorly responsive, and whenever you drive them you are promised a huge swath of boring terrain to cross, with not much to do in the meantime. There are car driving sections in Alan Wake, and they seem mightily pointless.
The game seems at times like it KNOWS it’s over-stretched, so it tries to shore up that problem with… another problem. It seems… stretched, and in fact, in the final chapter around 80% of the runtime is just non-stop combat. Maybe even being HALF it’s own current length. In fact, I feel like Alan Wake is one of hte games that would ACTIVELY BENEFIT from being SHORTER. They are cool and atmospheric the first couple of times, what with the foggy foreboding trees, but in the end they all blend together and there’s nothing to do in them anyway, apart from just fighting the same repetative enemies. It’s not an overstatement to say that about half of Alan Wake takes place in the samey-looking dark spoopy forests and logging camps. The repetative gameplay is exacerbated by the repetative LEVEL DESIGN, too. With a pretty limited amount of weapons, to boot – a revolver, two types of a shotgun, a hunting rifle and flashbangs and flares. And you do that over, and over, and over. So in the end it feels like it’s just one type of enemy, just sometimes you have to shoot them more times. But they are all vulnerablle to the EXACT same tactics and can be dodged the same way. And you fight them all the exact saame way, they just take a different amount of punishment. They more or less attack the same way, the fast taken are just a little faster, but you can dodge them nonetheless. To be honest, the three enemy types would be kinda lacking to me even if they were substantially different. There are also Taken birds, but I don’t really count them as you encounter them only a couple of times through the game, and you only have to shine your light at them to destroy them quickly. Regular Taken, strong Taken and fast Taken. The main gimmick with the darkness wears off pretty quickly, because here’s the thing: there are three types of enemies, total. Repeat a couple hundred times through the game. The base mechanic is as such: you shine your light at the enemies for long enough to pierce the supernatural darkness that covers them, and then shoot them. I’m sorry to say that I think the base gameplay loop is boring as hell. I’m going to talk about the story last, since IMO it is an only element that could be argued to be good, or at least okay. I expected something in the similar vein.Īnd in the end, after finishing it, I must say… Is it just me, or does Alan Wake kinda suck…?
Those two things were enough to convince me to give it a try – I enjoyed Max Payne 1 and 2 a lot, even though I’m generally not a big shooter player.
Before I played Alan Wake I knew only two things about it – that it was made by the same people that made Max Payne, and that it had a dream-like atmosphere, touching on nightmares and the like, and was a bit of a thriller.
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