Welcome back to Now Loading In-Depth! I am ready to begin Season 2 of the series and because it has been nearly 3 months since the last edition I'm going to go over how this series works for old and new alike. Now Loading In-Depth (NLID) is a gameplay series where I play games of my choosing and do frequent impressions and/or progress updates for you about them. Any game released 2011 or back is available for me to play and as you may have read in the Season 2 preview there are many categories of games to tackle. And that's that, I just play games and update you on them every two or three days until they are complete and then move on to another game that I will announce in the FINAL update for the previous game. It's now to get on with the real deal of NLID gameplay impressions for the latest NLID game 2010's Alan Wake.

This first update for Alan Wake might be a bit of a short one, not because I didn't play very much, I am actually halfway through the game just starting Episode 4.... nope, it's just that I don't know how I feel about the game. It's not scary, it's not really psychological... I am almost always armed with a weapon and once you remove the shield of darkness surrounding the enemies they die in a few shots from the weakest weapon. It is kind of fun blasting "The Taken" *coughzombiescough* and watching the burn up to ashes... I don't know, I rarely get this kind of experience from a game. The story isn't really doing anything for me either and the all the Manuscript pages you pick do is spoil upcoming events or surprises that could have scared you... I know its supposed to be all oooooh what is written on the pages is coming true but it is more like, sigh, now I know a guy with a chainsaw is coming up in the next section.

Another detaching element is terrible lip syncing, not because it's all dubbed Asian movie styIe but because the mouths are simply just animated badly. I do kind of enjoy the forest setting and as I said the shooting isn't too bad... I just don't get Alan Wake yet, I am missing something that will stop me from feeling so neutral about it. Part of me kind of likes it, part of me thinks it's boring, lame and not scary and a third part just doesn't get it at all. I hate it when this happens as it is hard to describe and not usually very interesting... but that is half the fun of NLID seeing if my feelings about the game change and we'll see soon if I can snap out of my funk with Alan Wake.

Since I am so confused I will talk about the gameplay just a bit. Most of the gameplay takes place in the dark, usually in a forest and you walk along the path until the shadowy Taken appear. This starts a battle mode of sorts and you have to take them all out before proceeding onward; I tried running away but you can only sprint for so long and they are faster than you. To defeat them or anything covered in darkness you have to point your trusty flashlight at it until a circle of light closes and flashes, this means their shield is down and you can shoot them with your gun. You have a few different guns, a revolver (default weapon), two types of shotguns (double barrel and pump action) and a hunting rifle. Your arsenal is pretty large as you can carry the revolver, a flare gun (works like a grenade launcher but with light), a set of regular flares for creating a zone of safety, a set of flashbangs which act as your grenades and either the shotgun or the hunting rifle. Its best to take the weapons they give you in each area because you'll find the most ammo for that gun and a lot of time you will lose your weapons during scenes or after the episode is complete so there is no point holding on to your favorite gun. Speaking of episodes each "act" is sort of like a TV episode where each new episode starts with a "previously on Alan Wake..." summary. So far that is all there is to the gameplay: walk down dark forest trails shoot enemies when they appear and get to the end its pretty simple.

It's time to close out this edition of NLID. I can't see Alan Wake taking more than two updates to complete so I will most likely have the final update on it by Wednesday. In NLID news I think I am going to wait until after Final Fantasy XIII-2 is out before I start Final Fantasy 13 again, since I am most likely going to pick XIII-2 up and hopefully that will give me more incentive to complete a game that I am not really a fan of. I think that about covers it for this edition of NLID I will talk to you again in a day or two. Later. Loading Complete!