Worth the Wait, but Plan Ahead
It's rare that a game delivers on being story-driven for me, but Alan Wake succeeds. However, this positive note is also a bit of a downer.
Let me start off by saying that, as an achievement whore, I went through this game with a collectibles walkthrough next to me. I was careful to only look one item ahead so that I wouldn't spoil any major story points, but still. If I hadn't, I would probably rate this game considerably lower.
As I mentioned, the story is the strong point for 90% of the game. The conclusion is a bit off, but it's hard to pull together a supernatural mystery without it being a little hokey. Regardless of the slight drop in quality towards the end, the bigger problem is that it's a good story, but not good enough to make me want to go through it again.
The nightmare mode that's unlocked after the first playthrough is managing to keep my interest only due to the difficulty, but even that is half-hearted. If I hadn't grabbed all the collectibles the first time through, I think I'd be quite annoyed and end up leaving the game for months or years before really finishing it off (much as I did with flag collecting in the first Assassin's Creed).
The gameplay itself is fairly solid, but there is definitely some bugginess when it comes to the slow-mo camera. Sometimes (more in nightmare mode, unfortunately) it gets stuck spinning around me until I stop whatever it is I was trying to do. Normally this is holding a flare and walking away, which isn't exactly a pleasant thing to force the player to stop.
All in all, I think they succeeded in the goal of creating an action-thriller type game. It's extending, not innovating, but I think it works in this case. It feels like they're extending the original Alone in the Dark, and I'm certainly not going fault them for trying that.
