Sensationalism…I hate it. I hate it because it raises your expectations of something higher than they should be. When people throw around descriptive words like terrifying, thrilling, and scary I expect the product to be at least one of the three. I can’t say that is the case with Alan Wake. Now before you go and start thinking that this is going to be a bash review, let me tell you that your wrong. Even though I didn’t get what I expected, I received other surprises instead.
Alan Wake takes place in a small town named Bright Falls. The type of small town where everyone knows everyone else and their children. Alan Wake is an author who hasn’t written a book in about two years. He’s coming to Bright Falls to relax on vacation with his wife, or so he thinks. You find out your wife brought you to Bright Falls because of a doctor that works with creative individuals who are having a hard time producing work. Alan doesn’t like this, causing him to storm out of the cabin that he and his wife are staying in. A minute later you hear a scream, a crash, and that’s where your playing really begins.
Alan Wake has a good story that pulls you through the game. I know my sessions lasted longer than they would with a normal game because I wanted to find out what was going to happen next. The game is broken up into six episodes. At the end of each episode you get left with a cliff hanger and a closing song. I think this is a cool concept, however, the problem that I had with it was it broke up the pace of the game. Each episode is like starting the game all over again in terms of pace. Lot’s of dialog and walking in these parts, sometimes upward of 30-40 minutes. I guess this is part of the “ground breaking” story telling they were talking about.
Through out the game you find pages to a manuscript that you have written, but don’t remember writing. Most of the manuscript pages you get tell you about events that are going to help you in the future, others fill in side story to events that happen. As you move through the levels you will find that Alan narrates his own story…a lot. I didn’t mind it so much. What I did mind was the dialog between characters, especially between him and his wife. The dialog didn’t seem natural. It felt a bit forced. I also may not have liked it because of the awful lip sync. As the story goes on you get less and less cutscene so after a while I it didn’t bother me much.
Your journey through Bright Falls takes you to many places. From lumber yards to mine shafts, mountain tops to power plans. Even though you go to different places the over all feel is the same, you’re in a dark forest. Now, I don’t find myself in dark forests often, but I think Remedy did a good job creating the environment. They paid close detail to the foliage, shadow effects caused by trees and moon, and how the light from your flashlight interacts with the darkness. In the light you can even see the little spores and clippings that come off the trees and plants. There are some fog effects that they could have done better on though. I played the game on a 1080p 60htz LCD and noticed pixelation in the fog. Also, on the street lamps when the light is beaming down it’s a bit blurry. I don’t know if they was on purpose to help set the tone, or if it was just an oversight.
The look of the enemies is pretty unique. They’re covered in shadow and you need to burn the shadow off before you can hurt them. The characters do truly look like they are covered in shadow as opposed to just being dress in a shadow skin. The shadow is constantly coming off of them like steam, and when you focus the light on them the shadow begins to burn off of them causing sparks like your using a blow torch. When you kill an enemy they are instantly incinerated in a effect that’s similar to when Blade kills vampires, except it looks better here. The enemies are dark enough to blend in with the shadow, but just visible enough so that you don’t hurt your eyes seeing them. Also, they are visible enough to tell the difference between enemies. This is important because different units attack with different methods. Some ranged, some up close, and others with just really strong attacks.
In the beginning enemies come at you in groups of two or three, making it easy to manage them. As you progress you will get more enemies at a time coming from all different directions. Accordingly Remedy has given you an assortment of weapons to deal with these situations. Your basic weapons is a revolver, but you also can use a shotgun, rifle, flare gun, road flare, and flashbangs. Pistol, shotgun, and rifle should be used after you burn the shadow off of your enemy. The flare gun is the most powerful weapon in the game. Consider it something like your grenade launcher. A flare will not only burn the shadow off of enemies, but will also explode and kill a group of enemies.
Road flares are a great deterrent. You will find yourself in a situation many times overwhelmed by enemies, out of ammo, or out of flashlight power. The enemies will take advantage of these situations by moving in faster to attack. In these situations the road flares will save your life. When you pop one it creates a 360 degree barrier for you. You can take the time to reload, re-power, or just move the enemies away from you so that you can take them out one at a time. You can also walk with the flare instead of putting it on the ground if you need to move through an area. The flashbang is basically a grenade. If you find yourself surrounded by a bunch of enemies moving in fast, pop the flashbang and when the light goes away so do your enemies. I have to admit, the gameplay does get a bit repetitive. However, with the assortment of weapons and the situations you find yourself in it keeps the game fun.
A unique item that I did appreciate about the game was the way they utilized the camera. When you have a close call in this game, like narrowly escaping getting hit, they zip to a camera angle that show both you and the enemy close up and you barely escaping the hit in slow motion. This also happens when you pop a flare and your surrounded by enemies. The first time this happened to me in game was really cool. I knew there were at least three enemies around me. My flashlight goes out and I see them moving in. For defense I pop a flare, only to reveal that I was completely surrounded by seven enemies that I couldn’t see before because it was too dark. The way they do it is they change the camera to have the flare in the center and then do a 360 degree rotation around you in slow motion to show you your complete surroundings. I like to call this the drama cam.
While sound doesn’t play a major role in this game, Remedy still made sure to put some high quality sound effects. The guns sound like they pack a punch, the sound of your light burning shadow off of the enemies is convincing, and the sound an axe makes as it’s passing over you head because you dodged at the last second really makes you appreciate that you dodged it.
Now, you may be wondering about why I made my first comment. Almost every advertisement I saw said this game was scary, some even said terrifying. The game is neither of those. I was surprised at some points, but never scared. So either I have balls of steel or this is just another example of sensationalist advertising. Funny thing is that the game had SO MANY opportunities to make you crap your pants, but they took none of them. Even with the way enemies appear, they don’t just appear. The camera usually zooms out so you can see them and the music comes on. Even as you’re approaching them the music will get more dramatic.
It was also labeled as a psychological thriller. I disagree. The story was good and had a twist here or there, but far from a psychological thriller. Seven is a psychological thriller. This doesn’t take away from the game though. The game is good in it’s own right, but just not for the reasons advertised.
In my personal opinion I think the game is worth at least one play through. But because of the repetitive nature of the game and the type of story it is I really don’t see much replay value here. If you’re into collectibles you can search for manuscript pages and coffee thermos’ to expand the gameplay. If your like me though, and don’t really care to much about going back to get collectibles you left behind you may just want to rent or Gamefly this one…unless your like me in another aspect and like beefing up the game collection.
On the next page you can read my session notes if your interested. I have three of the four it took me to beat the game. The fourth one was lost in a horrible syncing accident. I don’t want to talk about it. If you do play the game, why don’t you see if you can pick up on all of the Max Payne references. They aren’t as obvious as you think…but they are there.
*Edit: I forgot to mention that the game comes with a code that will get you the first DLC for free. So basically you get $75 worth of game for $60 if you buy it new.
Session 1 – 2:26 hours
So far the game hasn’t wowed me. They paint this dark environment that is supposed to be scary, but it’s not really clicking for me. They try to build suspense by turning off street lights as your coming close to them, wind blowing things down, little noises in the woods. That’s not really creeping me out either. I’m not a fan of the voice acting, it doesn’t feel natural. The narration reads like a novel, which I guess is the point. You find pages to a manuscript that appears to be the events that are unfolding. The only problem with this is that you come across spoilers. You will read about something that hasn’t happened yet. So when you get to certain places you already know what’s going to happen.
There are lots of things to help the players. There are light activated arrows that point you in the direction of supplies. Music rises before enemies appears. Also fog gets thicker and darker when a event is about to happen. The game lets you know when you have defeated all enemies, the last hit is in slow motion. There appears to be plenty of ammo and flashlight batteries. I’m assuming this decreases as you increase the difficulty. The game looks good (not great) in the dark. In the light, not so much. Kind of the same effect the Doom 3 engine had in Quake 4. The lip syncing is terrible. Some times they speak and it doesn’t even looks like their mouth is moving. Facial expressions can use some work as well. I was a bit surprised to see pixelation on the fog. I figured since it’s a pretty big part of the game it would be clean, but not so much.
The game play is pretty simple so far. Your pretty much just trying to make your way from point to point without dying, dispatching enemies as you go along. I have to say it’s not the gameplay that’s pulling me through this game though, it’s the story. While I’m not a fan of the voice acting, the writing for the game is pretty good so far. It still has me interested so on I go.
Session 2 – 3:40 hours
The previous sessions stopped about 25 minutes into episode 2. In this session I made it from episode 2 to episode 4. Episode 3 felt like episodes 1 & 2 combined. New enemies appeared. Some larger and stronger. Others faster. Really cool shadow effects on the guys that move like quicksilver. Puddles of darkness started to appear, which hurt you if you step in them. Also, new weapons showed up. Rifles, flares, and flash bangs. It also looks like you need to search a bit harder to get the stronger weapons here. Had two driving segments. This puts the game into easy mode because all I do is run over the enemies.
More enemies around this time. Now that I get the opportunities to fight more enemies at a time there are some cool camera effects you get to see. Example, my flashlight was drained. I knew enemies were closing in, just didn’t know how many. I popped a flare only to reveal that I was completely surrounded in every direction and literally had a second to spare when I popped that flare. The game showed me this by popping the flare in slow motion and doing a 360 rotation around me. It was pretty cool. You will also get slow mo if you manage to dodge a enemy at the last second.
The game is getting really repetitive. Even with more enemies, there isn’t enough of them to keep me busy. Also, there is nothing to do while your not fighting enemies besides running. When puzzles do show up they are very simple. Most of the time this would drive me nuts but it’s not because they keep feeding you more and more story as you progress through the episodes so it’s not much of a drag. Hopefully this will change as I make my way through episode 4. I left off at the very start of episode 4, which it appears they are splintering the story even more.
Session 3 – 3:05 hours
Episode 4 started off breaking the action up once again. Spent the first 15 minutes or so not doing anything accept walking around. After that though it picked up again. Went through a hedge maze that had the potential for some cool, may be scary moments. But got zero of those. A few enemies but that’s it. Episode 4 brings more clarity to the story and some extra difficulty. There are extended periods where you have no flash light or weapon. Episode 4 also brought a new heavy duty lantern and the coolest moment possibly in the game. It involves you, a stage for a rock concert, and lots of enemies. The end of episode 4 shines a light on what’s really happening…or does it?
Episode 5 kicks off pretty quickly. This is the first time I got a flash light and a gun within the first few minutes of the episode. Get to run around with the Sheriff in this one. Getting through the town was pretty simple, fast and straight forward. Found myself at the next area in no time…where I saved and wrapped up this session.
