American Nightmare makes the core gameplay of Alan Wake actually tolerable, and builds upon the world of the original game in a couple of cool ways. That being said, at its core, it's still Alan Wake. It's a third person shooter that doesn't feel quite up to snuff even considering many of its contemporaries weren't that great, and it tries to lean into these pulp horror elements without ever hitting on anything super new or novel. I think this one definitely suffers from the shift in setting too, because the sparse desert never really lives up to the dense forests of its predecessor, either for the purposes of horror, encounter design, or just aesthetics.