holy shit, it's truly difficult to know where to even start with this trainwreck. part of me wants to just say that this is uniformly bad and not even bother with a post-mortem, because it's shockingly bad in so many ways. so many things that previous games got right (game length, difficulty balance, boss design) this game fucks up in tremendous ways. i would honestly be less critical of CVX if it hadn't been a RE game and the dev team had been unproven. CVX as a first outing would be remarkable in some ways (mostly graphically), and i could forgive a lot of the flaws as being beginner mistakes or otherwise growing pains. but as the fourth main entry (sixth if you're counting gaiden and survivor, which a lot of people don't) to the RE series, this is just sloppy and embarrassing.

easiest thing to nail this game to the cross over is the unannounced character swaps. you absolutely NEED to know when these are coming because inventory isn't shared if it's not in the storebox, meaning you could end up having most of your ammo on claire right before you switch to chris. it's a frankly baffling decision to make it forcibly integrated instead of doing something like RE2 and strictly isolating them. the only benefits you could get from doing the former is that the world is shared, and that only really comes into play in what the player does with rodrigo. considering how easily you run into a "i saved myself at riovanes castle and can't beat wiegraf" situation with this game, it's not worth it by any stretch of the imagination. i think if the game went further in the "two different characters exploring the same area" direction, you could justify how easy it is to softlock yourself with whatever positives that brings. as it is now though, the game has claire and chris explore the same settings at completely different times, so there's no opportunity for "character a does something that indirectly affects character b" like in RE2. it's all so wonderfully pointless in execution.

as far as the survival horror aspects go, it's just really rough goings in this game. enemies are at their most obstructive and annoying here; this is the entry that we can say finally killed the art of dodging enemies. the game throws so much ammo at you that you're foolish if you don't use it. the enemies themselves are also rotted in design. bandersnatches reach across entire rooms to damage you and go through walls/obstacles while you can't. hunters do a stupid amount of damage, take far more before they fall, and some can poison you now. and bats. yes, bats. it feels petty to complain about bats, but the few times they show up, if you don't have the lighter, they are fucking miserable to contend with. i think they don't even do THAT much damage, but they're so unbelievably frustrating and avoiding them is so cumbersome that it's just a comedy of errors any time they show up. a complete shitshow.

and you know what? cool, that's fine. silent hill games make a habit out of depowering the player and making them feel vulnerable because of an overwhelming amount of enemies. that's totally viable and i respect that design philosophy. the problem lies in that CVX does not intentionally do this. CVX wants you to feel powerful by slamming you with an excessive amount of ammo while simultaneously swarming you with a grating amount of enemies. again, i'm fine if the goal is "you're overwhelmed and need to think outside the box to survive", but it's literally just that you're playing exterminator with an extra large set of pests to clean up. lovely. i think the growing emphasis on combat in the RE games was always going to naturally lead to a situation like this, but i was still able to feel tension and resource management in 2 and 3. here, i ended up with an embarrassment of riches in both healing and ammo by the end, and any time i saw an enemy, it wasn't "should i engage this?" but instead a "all right, another rat to exterminate".

i think that's the damning flaw of CVX: it's more aggravating than difficult. enemy management is never truly dangerous, and the game gives you a truly stupid amount of first aid sprays to assure you that you're never in a large amount of danger. but mitigating threats, solving puzzles, backtracking several rooms at any given time. . . it starts to wear on you. the game itself is just obscenely long for a classic RE game, and by the end i was in the 30s on save count and still had plenty of ink ribbons leftover. i say that not to point to any problem with ink ribbon distribution, but more to say that the game was accounting for me to save even more than thirty times. the devil's advocate argument is that the game's giving you more ink ribbons than necessary to account for the fact that you could miss some (in the way that RE1 felt tight on ink ribbons until you learned where all of them are), but my counter is that the ink ribbon locations are extremely obvious most of the time. hell, how many times do you get a "typewriter with ink ribbons right nearby" situation in this game? i'm not saying that i wanted them to make saving harder; i'm saying that this is symptomatic of CVX's larger problem of being too bloated and not paced nearly well enough.

CVX isn't a particularly scary game, nor is it an interesting one. some of the lore behind the ashfords is minorly intriguing, especially when you get the full picture between alexander and his two children. but alfred is a one-note character (a sometimes amusing one-note, to be fair), and alexia is just whatever. why can she summon huge tentacles out of nowhere and has pyromancy? eh whatever who cares. she feels like a house of the dead final boss transplanted into the RE universe and the contradiction glares like a sore thumb. then again, this was the entry that decided to turn wesker into a superhuman whatever the fuck. if it was amusing, it'd be camp (see: RE5). but here? it's just. . . droll. anything fun that could be had with the premise or setting isn't, and character drama is played dreadfully straight. steve in general is such a wet blanket of a character that i'm all but hooting and hollering he never came back in another game (besides darkside chronicles).

i need to go back to harping on the gameplay a bit. there are infinitely respawning hunters in this game. the steve boss fight itself is like. . . look i can't say it's the WORST boss fight i've played recently because a. it's less of a fight and more of a "get the hell out of there" moment with an egregiously overpowered entity of damage and b. i'm doing a bitter mode replay of NMH2 and man, capital f Fuck new destroyman. but it still is worth stating that the "steve is transformed and trying to kill you D:" encounter is probably the most exceptionally shitty thing i've seen in the series up to this point. this game has a lot of moments like that, honestly. that moth hallway in the antarctic base has the artistic merit of that one episode of black mirror that ends with a guy getting sent trollface as radiohead plays. there's so many shitty rooms/encounters in this game, and it's relatively pointless to sit here and list every single one. i'm beating a dead horse here, but i need to stress how acutely shitty this game was to play on a room-by-room basis. i would state positives if i could genuinely find them.

i don't know if mikami and his dev team subordinates were being pressured by capcom to make a bigger and epicer RE game to follow in 3's footsteps of being bigger and more action-heavy. it certainly feels that way, and the game has not stood the test of time in that regard. it feels very "of its time" in potentially the worst way humanly possible. i've always wondered why the game plays snippets of the opening intro of claire raiding the umbrella building before you're about to start the game. that opening CG is nothing like the rest of the game and like, i'm here, i bought the game, you don't need to sell me on this false product. that lack of self-awareness and understanding is emblematic of the game as a whole. i don't know what it's trying to be, and whatever its goals are, it failed to accomplish them. i had a pretty terrible time playing this game, i fail to recommend it to anyone but the most diehard of RE fans, and i'm still shocked that mikami could've headed a project this bad. i'm officially a witness to why people stopped giving a fuck about RE's overarching plot or RE at all. a game this bad would've fucked me off of the series for a bit too, guys.

to quote my good friend casey, this game is a behemoth of shit.

the most unsalted tops ass shooter of the era. something of a canary in the coalmine in hindsight and the first of many dead eyed john carmack tech demos that lack the human component that made id's earlier work so compelling — namely john romero and sandy petersen

a comprehensive downgrade from atmosphere to movement to weapons to maps to enemy designs, functions, and even silhouettes. while it doesn't play poorly it settles on a perfunctory lurch early on and operates comfortably in that space til end credits roll four hours later

I revisit this thing every few years when the psyop hits successfully and seem to enjoy it less and less each time. in fairness I don't mind the quasi hub format even if it feels real conservative following hexen and strife, some of the setpieces are cute, and I eventually came around on how every monster looks like it was inspired by toy story. at one point I walked into a room full of people doin an elmer fudd thing for some reason? I don't know dude, this game's real dumb

From what I can tell, next to nobody agrees with me on this, but I think this game is kind of a disaster.

As a big MAX PAYNE guy and a fan of horror games, I snapped this up when it came out and played through it dutifully. In the end, I was left pretty cold by it, and over the next decade I’ve constantly thought about doing a revisit because I’ve always felt like I must have missed something. Well, thanks to the remaster, I finally got around to it, and I think that what I missed is that it just plain sucks. This run through was actively painful, and for close to the entire time, I wished I was doing anything else.

- First and foremost, I capital-h hate the combat. Hate it. After being so famously empowered by Remedy in MAX PAYNE, this game's thrilling new mechanic of having to fill out a fucking application in triplicate to ask each enemy individually if, oh please sir, may I shoot you now? feels like absolute shit. The dodge is the jankiest thing ever. Having no reticle sucks ass. The enemies taking the same amount of damage from every bullet every time makes shooting feel like homework. The overall combat design makes every encounter feel math-based, resource-based. You spend X bullets and Y items because there are Z amount of enemies. You can make some savings by exploiting the environment if you look around. Maybe that’s a deliberate choice and maybe that’s fun for people, but I like shooters to be spontaneous and surprising – I like reacting in the moment. This very much feels like the opposite of that. I Hate it.

- Moving, running, jumping – all feel like crap. Wake drives like a boat. And the camera is placed terribly.

- The enemies are bad. You’ve got a less-interesting, less-scary version of the DEADLY PREMONITION zombies, and that’s it. Seriously. Don’t talk to me about bear traps or goo puddles or flying ‘poltergeist’ physics objects or fucking BIRDS because, wow, that stuff is embarrassing. Literally make a second enemy type.

- The story is stupid, and very badly told. Hey, what if Stephen King went to Twin Peaks? (It would suck, is the answer.) I hate to be reductive and bring up those two points of reference that are quoted so, so much when it comes to this game (and so many others) but the narrative really is just those two things, and the most clumsy, unadorned, surface-level takes on them, combined to make something incredibly boring and unoriginal. From that instantly tiresome starting point (and I do mean ‘starting point’ - the words “Stephen King” are, incredibly, the first things spoken in this game) we have the sloppiest patchwork of levels and cutscenes stitched together that don’t dare slow down for a single second to analyze any particular point or let any moment breathe lest it become abundantly clear how little any single aspect OR the greater whole make sense. At times you might think they’re going for a SILENT HILL/Jacob’s Ladder type dream logic thing where there are levels of reality and individual scenes don’t necessarily connect in a logical way, but they’re not! It’s supposed to fit together and make sense! And God, it gets so King/Mike Flanagan dopey at the end (with a stunningly dumb finale), which is appropriate I guess, but still not good!

- It’s never scary, not once. Not even close, not even close to close. Not even the jumpscares. It is heroically, subversively unscary. Both MAX PAYNES are scarier, easily. Which is part of why this is so disappointing! I thought that Remedy would have had a great horror game in them.

- The woods are soooooooo fuuuckiiiiing borrrriinnnnggggg oh my goddddddddddddd

- The pacing is apocalyptically bad. Every chapter and the game in total feel impossibly, crushingly long. They deploy appropriate and fairly well-done TV show-style “Previously on Alan Wake …” interstitials, but hey guys, guess what? Episodes of Twin Peaks weren’t two and a half hours long.

- The game’s only, only move to shake things up is to take all your guns and power-ups away. It happens multiple times per chapter and has the most hilarious of justifications in the story (or just none at all, sometimes). You have to re-upgrade your flashlight and find a new revolver, like, literally ten times apiece. It feels. Like SHIT.

Are there positives? Sure, a couple. The collectible manuscript pages are a great idea and help flesh out supporting characters and unseen events in a cool, in-universe way that the main narrative definitely doesn’t have the time or confidence for. They are still by their nature the opposite of “show-don’t-tell”, but I’ll take it. What else … uh … James “Voice of Max Payne” McCaffrey shows up in a brief role and is great, but that mostly just makes me want to play MAX PAYNE 3 again. And then there’s … um …

Anyway, this has been good for me. I feel like I’m finally getting closure on this. I finally understand my relationship with this game: I really don’t like it, and I find it super disappointing! And yet a big part of me is still excited about a sequel because in my mind, this game should have been a slam dunk and I feel like Remedy can still get a horror game right. I’m pulling for them! But this sucks, man.

Ever since I finished the game, Alan Wake, my brain has been possessed by Alan Wake’s narration. I have to describe every action, every detail, every intention, even if it’s clear or better left unsaid, and I do not like it. The only way to stop this horror it’s to write a review of the game, so I can stop getting peeved about this forsaken game and save my own sanity.

“My god, I do not remember this game feeling as much as a flattened version of Max Payne 2” I thought to myself as I was playing the first level. The gameplay seemed simple and strange, after getting through some more action packed missions thought there must be more than it meets the eye, but like Stephen King said: “If I’m not having fun with the gameplay to begin with I’m not thrilled to explore the depths of it!”.

The game’s lowest points are when it tries to do horror, whenever I have to get past The Taken it’s such a nightmare! The game can be a fun romp even though it never catches with Remedy’s previous work, Max Payne that is.

I don’t know what the coffee thermos are for. All I know is that I have to go the wrong way to get them, it’s not fun nor clever, just a waste of time, but that’s the way video games raised me. I like that the woods makes the levels feel so massive, even though when I’ve had it with the game, Alan Wake, I end up following the radar and hoping for the best, which feels cheap.

I don’t like Alan Wake the person, writer or even the cutout, but maybe I have some kind of appreciation of this game, even if it annoys me. The most interesting things about the game are the parallels between the development of Alan Wake, the character, and Remedy, the makers of Alan wake, the game. I despise Barry though, couldn’t be funny to save his life.

As the clackety clack of my keys as I write this review I can feel Alan’s narration slipping through… maybe I can rest now…