Silent Hill 2 for people who like John Woo movies.

Jokes aside, this game is just perfect. Remedy's best game (I have not played Alan Wake 2 yet, will need a better PC before I get to it) and one of the best games of all time. There aren't many third person shooters that feel as satisfying as this.

''Max Payne's journey through the night continues.'' ... Welp, too bad it wasn't in the way they probably intended. lol

I remember when this came out and the general response seemed to be that people thought it was a PG Silent Hill for XBOX kids, except it didn't hold up to any survival horror fans' standards because 1. there were no zombies, the enemies were just regular people who talked weird and were scared of light, hell some of the enemies were literally just floating objects. 2. Alan isn't a very likeable protagonist and none of the other characters are very compelling either, and I'm not sure many casual players made it far enough to get to the more interesting meta facets of the narrative.

Having played Control first, and admittedly mostly playing this one as a bridge to Alan Wake II, I'm actually a lot more interested in it as a build-up to Remedy's shared universe thing now that they've established themselves more. I can 100% see where someone would be confused playing this in 2010 and feeling like it's underbaked, but it's a lot more satisfying now that I know where they were going with this long-term, between the meta aspects and the anomalous entity narrative. I love the way the enemies seem to just compulsively braindump familiar phrases like the Hiss victims in Control, but people were definitely confused by that and probably thought it was some kind of comedy thing. I can even make a case for the bad dialogue, I think they just didn't ham it up enough that Alan wrote that shit himself. There are so many shitty references that Alan would totally write, down to the stupid FBI agent CRIMINALLY breaking the flow of dialogue every other sentence to insult Alan by calling him any other horror author's name he can think of.

It's cool, but it's still far from fantastic. Mechanically it leaves a lot to be desired, there are plenty of balancing issues that could have been solved by taking another run at the resource pools and taking out some of the combat padding. I also think they could have gone harder with the narrative to drive home what they were trying to do, especially to the XBOX audience that was mad this wasn't really trying to be a replacement for Playstation's survival horror exclusives.