I played the original on 360 when it came out and remembering liking it a lot; I even snaked an ethernet cable into my childhood bedroom so I could buy and download the DLC. I dipped back into Alan Wake to remind myself what it felt like, and to refresh myself on the characters and story before the sequel releases later this month. I had somewhat of a good time playing through the first three chapters; I love the vibe and mood. But I'm not going to finish my playthrough.
Alan Wake is a horror themed Zelda like. Each chapter is made up of sequences of exploration, action, and puzzle solving, broken up by infrequent cut scenes. There are two modes of exploration sequences--at the beginning of chapters there are safe locations to look around in, talk to characters, and explore the space. After a cut scene, the rest of a chapter follows Alan Wake moving from location A to B. In between enemy encounters, you explore dark, spooky places looking for resources (ammunition, flares, weapons, and collectibles). There may be puzzles to solve in your traversal, but most of the game is made up of its action segments.
The shooting feels good, but there's not very much to it. You shine a flashlight on a guy while he ambles towards you, popping his shield right before he gets within melee range, then blowing him away just in time in close quarters pistol combat like you're John Wick via James Sunderland. Letting an enemy get close to you right before stunning them always felt really fun to pull off. For groups of enemies you have to do a little crowd control and herding, so you can get multiple enemies in your light beam or more typically blow them all up at once with the flashbang or flaregun.
There are fun fights, but for every encounter with an interesting arena, or with lamps you can activate as traps or barrels to explode, there are five dull encounters where you have to fight a bunch of guys in the woods, which looks and feels exactly the same throughout the game. These woods fights feel compulsory, like the player might get bored from just wandering around in the dark--could they be vestiges of Alan Wake's original open world concept? Either way, like random counters in JRPGs, they are not usually very fun, and happen constantly. Maybe these encounters are meant to whittle down your ammunition like a survival horror game, but I never once was really low on anything, and I rarely found myself even close to running out of ammo for a particular weapon, and I wasn't particularly frugal about using my weapons either.
Due to the limited action, and the frequency and lack of variety in encounters, I found myself unfortunately pretty bored for a lot of my time with the game. I wanted to get to the next interesting part, and it meant wading through a bunch of bullshit to get there. I'm hoping to finish the Control Wake DLC before Alan Wake 2 comes out, and I wouldn't have had time to finish this game as well, so I decided to go ahead and drop the game after the start of the fourth chapter. I'm disappointed to say that putting the game down was easy.
Alan Wake is a horror themed Zelda like. Each chapter is made up of sequences of exploration, action, and puzzle solving, broken up by infrequent cut scenes. There are two modes of exploration sequences--at the beginning of chapters there are safe locations to look around in, talk to characters, and explore the space. After a cut scene, the rest of a chapter follows Alan Wake moving from location A to B. In between enemy encounters, you explore dark, spooky places looking for resources (ammunition, flares, weapons, and collectibles). There may be puzzles to solve in your traversal, but most of the game is made up of its action segments.
The shooting feels good, but there's not very much to it. You shine a flashlight on a guy while he ambles towards you, popping his shield right before he gets within melee range, then blowing him away just in time in close quarters pistol combat like you're John Wick via James Sunderland. Letting an enemy get close to you right before stunning them always felt really fun to pull off. For groups of enemies you have to do a little crowd control and herding, so you can get multiple enemies in your light beam or more typically blow them all up at once with the flashbang or flaregun.
There are fun fights, but for every encounter with an interesting arena, or with lamps you can activate as traps or barrels to explode, there are five dull encounters where you have to fight a bunch of guys in the woods, which looks and feels exactly the same throughout the game. These woods fights feel compulsory, like the player might get bored from just wandering around in the dark--could they be vestiges of Alan Wake's original open world concept? Either way, like random counters in JRPGs, they are not usually very fun, and happen constantly. Maybe these encounters are meant to whittle down your ammunition like a survival horror game, but I never once was really low on anything, and I rarely found myself even close to running out of ammo for a particular weapon, and I wasn't particularly frugal about using my weapons either.
Due to the limited action, and the frequency and lack of variety in encounters, I found myself unfortunately pretty bored for a lot of my time with the game. I wanted to get to the next interesting part, and it meant wading through a bunch of bullshit to get there. I'm hoping to finish the Control Wake DLC before Alan Wake 2 comes out, and I wouldn't have had time to finish this game as well, so I decided to go ahead and drop the game after the start of the fourth chapter. I'm disappointed to say that putting the game down was easy.