God, this game is so good!

I don't get why there isn't a survival mode in there though. My favourite bits of the game is where you stand fast somewhere and you have a bunch of elements you can use in the environment, and guys keep coming. The combat is soooo satisfying!

The story is mostly faffing about, the game is front loaded with a few too many aimless treks through woods (that are, granted, meant to make you feel lost and aimlessly wandering, but since you have a marker to follow, they just end up feeling pointless instead) and it's a bit unevenly paced where sometimes out of nowhere comes a tiny, super obvious puzzle, almost apologetic in its design.

Those things all keep it grounded and out of "amazing" air space, but so many things conspire to make it incredibly compelling to me regardless. Combat is brilliant, just god damn brilliant. There's an X factor to the dance you engage in with the enemies that somehow builds on the beats of Max Payne 2's combat, but then surpasses it in almost every regard thanks to incredibly finely tuned tactile feedback from every action.

The way the story is told, and the enthusiasm with which it's told by far make up for the fact that the story itself is more or less all over the effing place. Similar to how Max Payne was far more excited to be a noir *thing* with nods to its genre than a particularly well concieved plot, Alan Wake is happier about being a mystery than being a coherent plot shrouded in mystery. There are interesting elements in play, conceptually, but they mostly just hang around in a story that doesn't really seem to know where it's going with them. I think that's fine though. It still establishes an atmosphere and makes you curious to see what's around the bend, even though the payoff is rarely (if ever) worth it.

But the game just feels so god damn nice to play. At first the camera system throws you off, but when that clicks, it makes so much god damn sense. Whether you're illuminating your path ahead, navigating between obstacles in the rough forest terrain, or whether you're just speaking to an NPC, the camera placement and movement complements everything spectacularly well. Even the sensitivity and springyness of your flashlight/aim regardless of what the camera is doing makes moments of narrowly dodging out of an enemy's way and steering your flashlight's beam up towards them while stumbling away, only to start burning away at them and coming out of slow motion, blowing them to bits with a shotgun. IT NEVER GETS OLD. You may think it gets old when they pour a new bucket of shadow people into the environment and you're like "here we go agaiiin..." but then you start EFFING DUDES UP and it's STILL BRILLIANT.

The game does drag some from time to time because they're a bit uneven with changing up the scenery and keeping you on your toes. Its "shit hitting the fan" moments thankfully veer more towards the MW2 school of "you fuck up you're dead" than the UC2 one of "don't worry, we'll make sure every escape looks narrow", so when they do put you in a heavily scripted sequence there's real sense of urgency. However, even within the framework of the core game, they have moments of tangible context, or mixing the type of encounters up, that are far more exciting than the forest trekking baseline. The more gamey Alan Wake gets, the more exciting it is I guess, because while the atmosphere is thick and impressive, it's sorely lacking in suspense once you're used to combating the enemies they throw at you.

Overall though, I'm really impressed with it. It feels almost identical to the first Uncharted, though placed in a different genre with the apropriate gameplay elements to boot. It hits the beats of the type of experience it wants to be with the same conviction as Nathan Drake's first pulp adventure romp, and really introduces the 360 platform to that philosophy of character action game for the first time. The presentation is excellent, the world convincing, the characters charismatic, and the gameplay superbly fluid and satisfying. If Microsoft have ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER, they'll nurture this like a tiny, beautiful baby bird. It's exactly the type of thing to cut through all the testosterone space murders that dominate the platform.

Got it, played it and finished it. Similar to Episode 2 for Half Life 2, this is definitely some of the best Alan Wake stuff you can play. It has a spot on, confident groove going from the outset, with a much more dense "route" both in terms of encounters and meaningful geometry. It consistently marries its narrative with its gameplay in a way that the original game didn't quite get around to until about two thirds in, and at least for me it truly rows home the flexibility of this fiction. The fiction even feeds into combat here in a really clever way.

Very exciting stuff and you should definitely grab it asap.


I'm trying really hard to avoid hating Red Dead Redemption for stealing away people from this. Apart from having rediculously satisfying combat mechanics which for all intents and purposes make up the body of the game, it's also really smart and interesting in a way that I think people may not be used to. It's not as sharp and haunting as Shattered Memories as a story, but the story of Alan Wake is -- and I know I've said this already but -- really secondary to the way it's told and the concepts it deals with. Especially if you engage in any sort of creative writing yourself, or perhaps to a degree any creative outlet, you'll find something very relatable in the elements that make up Alan Wake's narrative and fiction. I don't want to give anything away without spoiler tags, but suffice to say I find the way it makes a metaphor out of the core of creativity, rather than the things derived from it, very cool and very fun to think about.

This game is a terribly paced, atrociously written, poorly produced budget horror game. Whatever innovation the gameplay had at the very onset was lost in the terrible level design and awkward encounters. You know how in movies/tv/books the most boring and mundane aspects of life are removed to highlight the more dramatic and exciting aspects? This game feels like it forgot that. Only thing missing was a mini-game picking out which reams of paper to use at Office Depot when Wake was trying to write, or booking his hotel and flight fare for travel to Bright Falls. Feels like they intentionally built the game as a series of bridges and forgot that it had to lead somewhere. Remedy probably ran out of steam and just decided to ship a simple title. This isn't the Alan Wake I had expected. On the last half of the last level and I have had no motivation to proceed, let alone play any of the DLC.