(Review originally written in 2010)
Alone in the Dark is so bad even the Uwe Boll movie can't compare.
In the beginning there was a great series: Alone in the Dark was the game that inspired all the survival horror games that ever existed. Then, after years of slumber, someone decided to revive the franchise and produce a cinematic sequel, inspired by blockbuster disaster movies like cloverfield. The result is a spectacular and flashy romp, but the underlying game falls apart as soon as you take control of the character.
The camera is atrocious: you can't freely rotate it and sometimes it will refuse to tilt up and down, so you won't be able to study your surroundings. You can toggle a first person view, but it's so slow and clunky it's a pain to use. The character handles like a broken tank, in the attempt to copycat Resident Evil 4's control scheme, they created a mess, where you will often move in the opposite direction than expected. The combat is dreadful: there's more action in children playing tag than in the broken lock on fighting mechanic, where you have to pick up objects and awkwardly swing them to hit your enemies. It's slow, it's unsatisfying and you can't counter enemy attacks, so it's pointless.
The game also features half baked Prince of Persia climbing sections, but they are so poorly executed they require a huge amount of trial and error to traverse them.
Finally, the driving section, the rotten cherry on this huge crap cake: you have to speed through a crumbling New York, dodging traffic and falling buildings to reach central park, while chased by a big crack acting as a time limit. Unfortunately this section is so broken it's just unplayable: the road will break at random, causing your car to get stuck everywhere and to flip 50 feet in the air for no reason, also, mess up once and you have to start over.
That's all I could push myself to playing, I don't know if the game gets better later on and I don't care: the first hour was so painful I can't just wait for the store to open tomorrow to return this game.
It's so awful it puts its prequels to shame and so bad even the Uwe Boll movie can't compare.
EDIT: about one year after returning this game I have borrowed a copy of it and played it in its entirety, and my conclusion is the following: it was very ambitious but they had no idea of how to make it all work together. The result is still a disaster.
Alone in the Dark is so bad even the Uwe Boll movie can't compare.
In the beginning there was a great series: Alone in the Dark was the game that inspired all the survival horror games that ever existed. Then, after years of slumber, someone decided to revive the franchise and produce a cinematic sequel, inspired by blockbuster disaster movies like cloverfield. The result is a spectacular and flashy romp, but the underlying game falls apart as soon as you take control of the character.
The camera is atrocious: you can't freely rotate it and sometimes it will refuse to tilt up and down, so you won't be able to study your surroundings. You can toggle a first person view, but it's so slow and clunky it's a pain to use. The character handles like a broken tank, in the attempt to copycat Resident Evil 4's control scheme, they created a mess, where you will often move in the opposite direction than expected. The combat is dreadful: there's more action in children playing tag than in the broken lock on fighting mechanic, where you have to pick up objects and awkwardly swing them to hit your enemies. It's slow, it's unsatisfying and you can't counter enemy attacks, so it's pointless.
The game also features half baked Prince of Persia climbing sections, but they are so poorly executed they require a huge amount of trial and error to traverse them.
Finally, the driving section, the rotten cherry on this huge crap cake: you have to speed through a crumbling New York, dodging traffic and falling buildings to reach central park, while chased by a big crack acting as a time limit. Unfortunately this section is so broken it's just unplayable: the road will break at random, causing your car to get stuck everywhere and to flip 50 feet in the air for no reason, also, mess up once and you have to start over.
That's all I could push myself to playing, I don't know if the game gets better later on and I don't care: the first hour was so painful I can't just wait for the store to open tomorrow to return this game.
It's so awful it puts its prequels to shame and so bad even the Uwe Boll movie can't compare.
EDIT: about one year after returning this game I have borrowed a copy of it and played it in its entirety, and my conclusion is the following: it was very ambitious but they had no idea of how to make it all work together. The result is still a disaster.