The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

There was a time where Alan Wake was a huge thing. People were super excited about it.
Then like… five years passed.
Then it came out, and I didn’t really hear a lot of excitement or buzz about it. “This is exactly the kind of game I should Gamefly!” I told myself. So I did.
Now I have beaten it.

Alan Wake is a really mediocre game.

Seriously, I go back and forth on being very, very down on it to being kind of eh on it to being all “Yeah, that was pretty good.” It’s such a swing-y game in many ways. When it’s working, it’s very fun, but when it breaks, it’s really quite frustrating. I don’t know.

This is most clear in the gameplay. The combat is decent enough. You shine flashlights on enemies until they pop in light, and then you can shoot a few rounds into them and kill them. You have to dodge enemy attacks as well to survive. When it’s working, it’s a fun variation of normal shooter stuff, and a good time. However, as the game progresses, they start spawning more and more enemies in places where you can’t see them. They sneak up on you and hit you twice, and then you’re almost dead, and one stray smack will finish you off. The result of this is that eventually you get into death loops where you have to go “Okay, this guy will spawn here, have to take him out first, then this guy, then run over here and another guy will spawn, but I have to take out the guy behind me first…” This kind of gameplay is obscenely meta and, frankly, unfun. The game forces it on you, even on the easiest setting, “Normal.” Add to that inconsistent checkpoints that sometimes leave you with having to complete multiple combats before you get another one, and you can see where the combat can sometimes really frustrate.
On top of all this, the game loves to make you repeat the same hour or so of powering up, instead of giving you new toys to play with. Alan is apparently incapable of, say, putting a gun in the pocket of his coat, because he is constantly losing his guns and flashlight. Constantly. Which causes you to basically replay the same sequence where you’re like “Oh, here’s a flashlight, run run, oh, here’s a revolver, fight a little, oh, here’s a shotgun, now I can really fight” every hour. It was a neat trick once, but the game constantly relies on it, and it kind of falls flat. I’ve been told that Remedy’s previous games, the Max Payne games, were the same way. I never played those, though. Maybe someone who had would have been expecting this. I just found it a little annoying and pointless.

The story also has it’s ups and downs. The characters themselves are pretty well fleshed-out and acted. Alan is a fine enough character, and his agent Barry is a perfect example of a comic relief character who is also a genuine character you kind of like. There are also some really cool moments in the game, including an incredibly dramatic “hold this position” battle on a certain farm which I won’t spoil. However, the plot itself just isn’t that engaging. Alan’s trying to get his wife back, and is playing through a story he wrote, sure. But the story is constantly reiterating things you know already, like they were some big revelation, when you figured them out hours ago, and the entire plot is completely predictable. Using the manuscript pages to add background depth and foreshadowing is a decent idea, but it’s also difficult to do well. Some pages work perfectly, while others just tell you things you already know, or ruin intense moments in a way that much, much less effective than just watching them play out. It just doesn’t work perfectly well.

The best part of the game, I think though, were the Night Springs TV shorts. You stumble across Televisions that show this old Twilight Zoneish show called Night Springs. They were live acted, incredibly cheesy, and a lot of fun. I was looking forward to those a whole lot more than the actual plot itself.

So… yeah. I’m pretty negative in this review… it’s a pretty middle of the road game. It’s a rental game. Rent it and enjoy it, but it’s really not worth buying. If I had bought it, I would have gotten “The Signal” DLC story for free, but eh, I didn’t really feel like I missed anything. Besides some Gamerscore, I suppose. Alan Wake. Mediocre. Yeah.