After over a decade since enjoying the first Alan Wake, and having recently played Control (about which I was very lukewarm), I was skeptical about Alan Wake II. A lot about taste can change in a decade, and so much about Remedy's most recent game rubbed me the wrong way.
I am really glad I gave this game a chance!
Alan Wake II totally nails the atmosphere and a bonkers layered story that somehow manages to be follow-able, with a cast of sympathetic characters who have a surprising amount of depth. The game is visually stunning and weaves between real-time in-engine rendering and "FMV" style cutscenes seamlessly -- it's the kind of thing you might expect to be jarring but it feels completely natural. The FMV cutscenes are truly something special and are probably my favorite part of this game.
And I won't spoil it, but the "Initiation 4" chapter is one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time.
Since I played Control very recently, I couldn't help but note the contrast in the character writing. Where Control's characters were (for the most part) boring, or in the case of Jesse, annoying as hell, Alan Wake II was a breath of fresh air. Alan and Saga are both characters I enjoyed getting to know better (and by the way, I have a hard time thinking of another game where you play as a mom). There's no "well THAT just happened"-style quips here.
Don't get me wrong, Alan Wake II is at least as bonkers (if not more so) as Control, and it's goofy as hell. But its characters take the world seriously, and I never felt like they were winking at the camera asking me to GET A LOAD OF THIS.
Despite my distaste of much of Control, I did enjoy the tie-ins to the FBC, and I'm intrigued to see where Remedy takes their expanded universe in the future.
The story feels like a bit of a pretzel - you get the gist of it through one playthrough, but there's so much going on here and it feels so layered that I could see a second playthrough being quite rewarding.
Now for the not-so-great, I do have a few complaints with the game.
Firstly, the gameplay isn't actually very fun. It's not BAD, it's just... pretty mid? Nothing very exciting, and the difficulty feels very off in my opinion. After a couple of hours I decided to turn the game down to "story" difficulty, expecting the fights to be trivial. Strangely, bosses still have a surprisingly large health pool on story mode and it's still pretty easy to die during a boss fight. The regular enemies can be taken down in 1 or 2 hits on story mode, which feels correct, but I'm not sure what's going on with the boss fights. It makes me wish they had included the granularity that Control's difficulty settings have. That said, I appreciate that combat isn't such a big part of this game.
As I said earlier, the game is visually very beautiful, but it's also very DARK. Combined with the fact that there isn't a mini-map (there is a map but it has to be opened full-screen), navigating some of the levels can be a little confusing, and I did get lost in some of the game's maze-like areas because of this.
My final bone to pick here is that the game is graphically demanding. I played on an RTX 3080, which is a pretty decent card, but even at 720p on the lowest settings (which still look amazing) my framerate dipped pretty regularly. It's a minor complaint for me because it was still completely playable but I really wish it hadn't been the case.
In the big picture though, I'm only taking a half star off for my complaints because I enjoyed it so much. Alan Wake II was a fascinating genre-mixing experience that does things I've never seen before in a video game, and it does them successfully.
I am really glad I gave this game a chance!
Alan Wake II totally nails the atmosphere and a bonkers layered story that somehow manages to be follow-able, with a cast of sympathetic characters who have a surprising amount of depth. The game is visually stunning and weaves between real-time in-engine rendering and "FMV" style cutscenes seamlessly -- it's the kind of thing you might expect to be jarring but it feels completely natural. The FMV cutscenes are truly something special and are probably my favorite part of this game.
And I won't spoil it, but the "Initiation 4" chapter is one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time.
Since I played Control very recently, I couldn't help but note the contrast in the character writing. Where Control's characters were (for the most part) boring, or in the case of Jesse, annoying as hell, Alan Wake II was a breath of fresh air. Alan and Saga are both characters I enjoyed getting to know better (and by the way, I have a hard time thinking of another game where you play as a mom). There's no "well THAT just happened"-style quips here.
Don't get me wrong, Alan Wake II is at least as bonkers (if not more so) as Control, and it's goofy as hell. But its characters take the world seriously, and I never felt like they were winking at the camera asking me to GET A LOAD OF THIS.
Despite my distaste of much of Control, I did enjoy the tie-ins to the FBC, and I'm intrigued to see where Remedy takes their expanded universe in the future.
The story feels like a bit of a pretzel - you get the gist of it through one playthrough, but there's so much going on here and it feels so layered that I could see a second playthrough being quite rewarding.
Now for the not-so-great, I do have a few complaints with the game.
Firstly, the gameplay isn't actually very fun. It's not BAD, it's just... pretty mid? Nothing very exciting, and the difficulty feels very off in my opinion. After a couple of hours I decided to turn the game down to "story" difficulty, expecting the fights to be trivial. Strangely, bosses still have a surprisingly large health pool on story mode and it's still pretty easy to die during a boss fight. The regular enemies can be taken down in 1 or 2 hits on story mode, which feels correct, but I'm not sure what's going on with the boss fights. It makes me wish they had included the granularity that Control's difficulty settings have. That said, I appreciate that combat isn't such a big part of this game.
As I said earlier, the game is visually very beautiful, but it's also very DARK. Combined with the fact that there isn't a mini-map (there is a map but it has to be opened full-screen), navigating some of the levels can be a little confusing, and I did get lost in some of the game's maze-like areas because of this.
My final bone to pick here is that the game is graphically demanding. I played on an RTX 3080, which is a pretty decent card, but even at 720p on the lowest settings (which still look amazing) my framerate dipped pretty regularly. It's a minor complaint for me because it was still completely playable but I really wish it hadn't been the case.
In the big picture though, I'm only taking a half star off for my complaints because I enjoyed it so much. Alan Wake II was a fascinating genre-mixing experience that does things I've never seen before in a video game, and it does them successfully.
wavebeem
4 months ago
SO TRUE SO TRUE