Alan Wake's Remedy
Finally after over 6 Years of development, Alan Wake is out. Was it worth the wait or should Alan have stayed asleep?
It’s the way the story is told that makes Alan Wake a great game. It’s a unique way of telling a story in a game. While you play you can often hear Alan Narrating like he’s reading from a book about what’s happening around him. This of course wouldn’t work if the Voice work wasn’t as good as it is. Alan especially is really convincing when all this crazy stuff is happening around him.
I don’t want to talk about the story too much because of how even early on there are constant plot twists and discoveries that I could easily spoil. To quickly summaries the plot Alan wakes up from a car crash with a week of memories missing and his wife Alice also missing. Alan is finding pages of a Manuscript for a book he doesn’t remember writing and what’s written on the pages is coming true.
As you progress through the game you find pages of this manuscript. These are mostly easy to find and are on the main path as you progress through the game apart from a few are slight hidden in corners of building and other fairly obvious locations. When you pick up these pages you can press the back button to have Alan read them to you. These actually give slight spoilers of what’s going to happen. I thought that when you pick up a page it would tell you of what is about to happen in about 5 minutes or so. But actually sometimes pages have events that you won’t even see and events that will happen to other characters and sometimes thee pages can have events written on them that will happen way latter in the game or what is happening to another person at the moment.
The art style when the darkness is nearing Alan makes the forest around him foggy and dark and really atmospheric. The only problem I have with the graphics is with character faces, the faces don’t look convincing when they talk but Bright Falls looks so mysterious at night that it’s hard to fault the game too much for some stale facial animations.
The game almost entirely takes place in Bright Falls; you don’t have to look too hard to see it’s similar to Twin Peaks. I thought the town is kind of generic; it’s the other environments that make Bright Falls an interesting place. I especially liked the lake house and the abandoned Cole mine.
The Forest in Alan wake is ideal for hiding enemies behind trees limiting your line of sight and ever second of the game I spent in the forest I felt vulnerable and franticly flashing my light at everything that moved.
The game is way more Linear then I expected even in the scenes where you get to drive cars there’s usually just the one road to drive down. But this isn’t a bad thing the environments do a good job of feeling bigger than they are, it almost feels like you can get lost in the forest. I wasn’t into the car driving in the game I felt it was nothing more than just following the road and running down helps Taken.
There’s a tonne of Collectables in the game and there mostly all worth finding, there are TV and radio shows which ever provide you with a few minutes of humour or some insight to what’s happening in bright Falls. There are also “hidden” weapon caches which give you supplies usually more ammo.
Despite Alan being a writer from the city he’s dam good with a gun, the gun combat in the game feels great. The controls take a little time to get used to because there different from other third person shooters but the game starts you off nice and slow for you to have plenty of time to get used to it.
The Combat is where this game excels. It’s different to most other horror/shooters and just feels right. My problem with most horror games is that as you progress through them you get more and more weapons and items in till the last third or quarter of the game is just you going guns blazing through hoards of enemies and only the early part of the game fells like a horror survival. But is Alan Wake you constantly loose the items or weapons you are carrying even late on in the game and apart from a few key points in the game were thee are loads of enemies you have limited ammo items and this helps it feel more like a survival horror game then a shooter. Most horror games have you being alone all of the time, in Alan Wake there are multiple occasions where you get other surviours fighting alongside you and this makes for some great larger scale gun fights.
I played the game on the “Hard” difficulty setting and if you play a fair amount of games this is the difficulty setting I recommend. Even on “Hard” I only died a few times. The game feels right on “Hard” you die in just a 3 or 4 hits and helps the game feel more horror survival because enemies in the game have a habit of sneaking up behind you while you’re shooting something else.
The game switches between day and night, Day being when you walk around town talking to locals and night being when the combat happens, this works early on because the day time sequences help break up the combat but later on in the game there is less day time and more night time sequences and it feels a bit to combat heavy. The combat doesn’t evolve but when this starts to become noticeable the game ends so it’s no game breaker. One of the few problems I have with game is that Limited enemy types. It could have done with more enemies because by the end of the game I felt tired of shooting the same 4 or 5 types.
The game is set up as a TV series with episodes that have previously on section at the beginning. I don’t think this game does the episodic style as well as Alone in the Dark or Phantasy Star Universe. I think this is because Alan Wake is missing the credits at the end of each episode and the next time section, having those to additions would have completed the episodic feel. Mayby this is just me being wierd but i would have liked more puzzles in the game, there's only about three in the game and it would have helped break up the combat especially in the later episodes if they would have put more obstacles in the players way.
The game is about 12 hours long and I found myself entertains for almost the entire time. IF you like horror/shooters then you’ve most likely already played this. If not then you should the story telling and unique combat make it roller coaster or maybe a novel coaster. I didn’t like the ending so much but if there’s going to be an Alan Wake 2 then I can forgive the slightly too open ending.
Overall - 9/10
Combat – 3/5
Graphics – 3/5
Story – 5/5
Style – 5/5
