Super frustrating, nearly-incompatible game designs running up against each other here, competing for space and making the game worse overall. One is the classic Alan Wake gameplay, and one is the semi-open-level yet-still-linear method of action progression.
Many compromises get made to fit these two styles together. The good: flashlight recharging is near instantaneous though you're now limited to ten batteries, not that it matters with the ammo boxes, and Alan can run farther while recovering faster, accommodating the faster pace and shift in genre/style. The neutral leaning-on-bad: Emergency boxes are now for resupplying all your ammo and batteries, and they respawn every so often, as do safe havens, making large portions of the game trivial even on Nightmare if you know how to balance your flashlight usage. You can only carry five flares and flashbangs, which becomes only a minor annoyance for flares but much more of a problem for flashbangs.
The bad: manuscripts are littered all over the maps in absolutely random spots (some of which you wouldn't naturally go near over the course of a level), but get shown with an icon on the minimap, meaning you spend a lot of wasted time looking at a minimap if you're interested in manuscripts. You have to be to a certain extent because there are weapon crates around that unlock certain weapons based on how many manuscripts you have, with up to 40 needed to unlock the assault rifle. If you want to play the arcade mode (a frustrating experience meant to satisfy sickos who hate themselves and their time), this is practically a requirement too. This makes the gameplay loop unsatisfying.
Speaking of the loop, the gameplay progression really boils down to playing the same three maps but doing less each time, excepting one thing in the process which you have to do slightly differently. Sure, you could say the repetition is the point to reflect Alan's reality. I call it boring. The tension in these maps is already not that high after your first mission in them, but when you're manuscript hunting, you can end up not seeing enemies for a very long time as they're primarily (not always) tied to paths you take to complete objectives. In Alan Wake, levels could be big, open, and confusing to navigate in the dark. But the structure of these levels and the tight, linear pacing of the game makes the tension effective no matter how often you play it. By necessity, this game has less of those compact tense moments, and encounters very often don't even happen if you're not doing objectives to go weapon + flare + manuscript hunting. So essentially, you're wandering around ghost towns staring at a minimap if you're not solely focused on the story objectives, arming yourself strong to the point of tension diffusion before continuing on to bodyslam the encounters. Nice!
As far as the heart and soul of the series go, the characters already introduced in Alan Wake are at least still great to hear from and see. Alan's less depressive disposition is mostly welcome, though his one-liners, charming and infrequent as they were in the original, now are frequent and cheesy if not outright embarrassing. He's otherwise mostly changed for the better here. Mr. Scratch is written in an interesting manner too. He may be blatantly modeled after Patrick Bateman, but both the writers and the game's aesthetics understand how to make it convincing. Framing the game as a Night Springs divergence is cool too! As usual too, the needle drops are all good here, even if a musical choice here or there may be a bit silly (Club Foot rocks, but I didn't really feel as hype the third time).
Unfortunately, hard to feel as positive for the game-original characters who are much more "present" than any characters from the original game sans Alan and Mr. Scratch. They're only really present to give you tasks to do. Serena may be the best-characterized of them on account of her association with Alice, while Emma at least gets something in the manuscripts. Rachel talks a lot of science and philosophy which distracts from her not having anything to her beyond that. All three still feel like afterthoughts. A weird, possibly(?) unintended side-effect is that Alan is now a hero saving damsels in distress constantly, barely-written damsels to boot; not quite the same as being a wife-lover loser.
It's pretty frustrating to see what Remedy were going for here. The commitment to sticking with Alan Wake's main gameplay mechanics is too at odds with the action direction they wanted to take to make anything work well. Did the story come first here, or did they marry the story to their gameplay hook? The latter feels more likely, which comes off as disappointing in the end when the story ultimately barely works on top of rough character writing and bad gameplay. Being short is a blessing only in that you don't need to spend too much time wallowing in it. I'm fine with Remedy taking the risk here, even if it didn't pay off.
Many compromises get made to fit these two styles together. The good: flashlight recharging is near instantaneous though you're now limited to ten batteries, not that it matters with the ammo boxes, and Alan can run farther while recovering faster, accommodating the faster pace and shift in genre/style. The neutral leaning-on-bad: Emergency boxes are now for resupplying all your ammo and batteries, and they respawn every so often, as do safe havens, making large portions of the game trivial even on Nightmare if you know how to balance your flashlight usage. You can only carry five flares and flashbangs, which becomes only a minor annoyance for flares but much more of a problem for flashbangs.
The bad: manuscripts are littered all over the maps in absolutely random spots (some of which you wouldn't naturally go near over the course of a level), but get shown with an icon on the minimap, meaning you spend a lot of wasted time looking at a minimap if you're interested in manuscripts. You have to be to a certain extent because there are weapon crates around that unlock certain weapons based on how many manuscripts you have, with up to 40 needed to unlock the assault rifle. If you want to play the arcade mode (a frustrating experience meant to satisfy sickos who hate themselves and their time), this is practically a requirement too. This makes the gameplay loop unsatisfying.
Speaking of the loop, the gameplay progression really boils down to playing the same three maps but doing less each time, excepting one thing in the process which you have to do slightly differently. Sure, you could say the repetition is the point to reflect Alan's reality. I call it boring. The tension in these maps is already not that high after your first mission in them, but when you're manuscript hunting, you can end up not seeing enemies for a very long time as they're primarily (not always) tied to paths you take to complete objectives. In Alan Wake, levels could be big, open, and confusing to navigate in the dark. But the structure of these levels and the tight, linear pacing of the game makes the tension effective no matter how often you play it. By necessity, this game has less of those compact tense moments, and encounters very often don't even happen if you're not doing objectives to go weapon + flare + manuscript hunting. So essentially, you're wandering around ghost towns staring at a minimap if you're not solely focused on the story objectives, arming yourself strong to the point of tension diffusion before continuing on to bodyslam the encounters. Nice!
As far as the heart and soul of the series go, the characters already introduced in Alan Wake are at least still great to hear from and see. Alan's less depressive disposition is mostly welcome, though his one-liners, charming and infrequent as they were in the original, now are frequent and cheesy if not outright embarrassing. He's otherwise mostly changed for the better here. Mr. Scratch is written in an interesting manner too. He may be blatantly modeled after Patrick Bateman, but both the writers and the game's aesthetics understand how to make it convincing. Framing the game as a Night Springs divergence is cool too! As usual too, the needle drops are all good here, even if a musical choice here or there may be a bit silly (Club Foot rocks, but I didn't really feel as hype the third time).
Unfortunately, hard to feel as positive for the game-original characters who are much more "present" than any characters from the original game sans Alan and Mr. Scratch. They're only really present to give you tasks to do. Serena may be the best-characterized of them on account of her association with Alice, while Emma at least gets something in the manuscripts. Rachel talks a lot of science and philosophy which distracts from her not having anything to her beyond that. All three still feel like afterthoughts. A weird, possibly(?) unintended side-effect is that Alan is now a hero saving damsels in distress constantly, barely-written damsels to boot; not quite the same as being a wife-lover loser.
It's pretty frustrating to see what Remedy were going for here. The commitment to sticking with Alan Wake's main gameplay mechanics is too at odds with the action direction they wanted to take to make anything work well. Did the story come first here, or did they marry the story to their gameplay hook? The latter feels more likely, which comes off as disappointing in the end when the story ultimately barely works on top of rough character writing and bad gameplay. Being short is a blessing only in that you don't need to spend too much time wallowing in it. I'm fine with Remedy taking the risk here, even if it didn't pay off.