Alan Wake

 I'm watching the credits roll as a begin to type this, flabbergasted at the high reviews this game has gotten. FFXIII is the only other game I have felt this compelled to write a review of against the grain. It is easily the worst horror game I have played this gen, worse than dead space, resident evil 5 and a myriad of others I have played. I've completed over 150 current gen games just for the record. It is bad in every way pretty much, I'm trying to think of some redeeming aspects, the dark atmosphere (fog/lighting in forest areas) and soundtrack are about the only things good in the game. The story is terrible and the gameplay is generic and repetitive. I wouldn't have been surprised if this game took 1 year to develop, I have no idea how it took 5 as it's really quite short on content.

It's always obvious where to go, there's no exploring, enemies are extremely easy to kill and there's very little variety. You regularly get all your inventory taken off you (probably 10 times in the 6-8 hours it will take to complete) which is annoying when you have saved up the powerful flare gun. There's not many weapons in the game (revolver, shotgun, rifle, flare gun, flares, flash bang nades and I guess the torch of which there are 3 types), there's no melee, there's collectables put everywhere that dont seem to do much, I really don't have a clue what the coffee thermoses do but I still collected 52 of them. Maybe they help you stay awake.

The story is about the equivalent of most other horror games, there's nothing interesting in it, no twists or surprises, the characters are not interesting either, there's only a handful in the game. Basically your wife drowns and you're wanderng around in a nightmare. The game reminded me a lot of both fear and resident evil 5. Some of the level design and gameplay design was definitely copying those. Like the power station part was similar to RE5. There were a few sections of car travel that were tacked on and pointless, just a remnant of what was once planned for the game. The gameplay was so generic and annoying, moments like herds of birds constantly ramming into you, objects being flown at you, black goo on the ground. There was no originality in the game. There's a section where you're running along the top of a damn and things keep floating around and hitting you and the floor disappears which highlighted how floaty and bad the jumping and controls are.

The graphics have been the most hyped part of this game and boy was it a let down. The facial animations are very poor. The game is filled with extremely low quality textures, I didn't see a single door in the game that wasn't extremely poor looking). They've copied a lot of the annoying graphical tropes from other games, I'm reminded of games like FEAR, the darkness, and the recent wolfenstein. There's some decent detail in parts, like a bookstore is full polygon detailed rather than textures.

The jacket movement is nice on the main character, but the textures are bad. Lots of weird patchy green compression artefacts on the hood and most of the textures in the game. There was a moment where a police woman is putting keys in a doorway that has no handle or lock, and her hand was clipping into the door. Transparencies are handled extremely poorly, with low resolution dithering on everything. There's a lot or crows (or perhaps they're ravens) in the game, they have weird little dots where light is shining through them. They're always clustered 4 pixels at a time, as is everything else in the game aside from the HUD, leading me to believe it is 1/4 the resolution of my tv (1920x1080). There's a lot of annoying motion blur which lowers the resolution and creates lots of large square blocks, and there's a lot of screen tearing when you move the camera around, especially in the residential environments. There's a lot of pop in in the forest area if you look for it. The cut-scenes are pre-rendered, though they use the same low quality models and textures, the resolution is increased as are effects and animations and that sort of thing and the game looks a lot better in those.

I don't have a clue what to rate this game, I really didn't enjoy one moment of it. I thought I didn't enjoy dead space that much either, but it had much better gameplay, a better story (even though it was pretty poor too), far more scary, better graphics, etc. And looking back it was much more fun. Max payne was a much better of a game as well. If you really want to play this, rent it. It is absolutely not worth retail price compared to the vast majority of other games offering much more. Even something like Haze is better value with a multiplayer mode and co-op. I know I'm going to be called a "troll" for this review, but I would say Haze was actually a better game. The story was more interesting, the gameplay was more interesting, there was more variety. Even the graphics werent much worse, and they didnt make the game dark to hide the poor graphics.

I'm reminded as well of Alone in the dark, that wasnt a really terrible game. It had similar gameplay including poor quality driving segments and similar unoriginal nonsensical generic horror story plot. Instead of setting all enemies on fire, in alan wake you shine a light on them, it's quite similar. You have torches revealing hidden words in both games. I'd say alone in the dark was actually a better game, and I can't explain why it got much worse ratings. Perhaps just hype. The fire physics were pretty good, there was a lot of weapons and customising of them, it had better maps with lots to explore, and was a lot longer.

I'm hesitant to post this because I know I will get criticised. If you loved the game that's fine, please don't criticise me for being honest about not liking it. I reckon a lot more negative opinions will be coming soon as people play it.