The fog around you bristles with a palpable dread. You stumble forward, axes whistling by your head. You dodge the cold of a rusty knife and sprint towards a generator in the distance. Your breath haggard, you fumble with a flare lighting it only seconds before a chainsaw mauls your gut. The Taken shrink back from the red spark. You grab the string on the generator, pulling it quickly to start it. The generator stalls as your flare dies. You quickly light another one, shivering in the cold of a fierce wind. You pull the generator string more paced this time. Then you pull it again. As your second and final flare sputters into oblivion the generator roars to life. A blinding white light surrounds you, pushing back the darkness. The Taken flee the scene. You are safe if only for the moment.
So goes a common scene in Alan Wake. While Alan maintains his fear throughout the 10 hour adventure, players will find that Alan Wake, while filled with solid mechanics and a creepy atmosphere, slowly loses its appeal over hours of repetitious combat. Alan Wake tells the story of the titular writer who is vacationing in the famed northwest after suffering from writer's block for several years. Accompanied by his wife Alice, Alan hopes the new setting will get him writing again. Soon after arriving, though, things go terribly wrong. Just settled in to their secluded lake island cabin, Alan goes for a walk. While looking out over the majestic oak trees, the power in the cabin dies. Alice screams and Wake charges home to her. He gets there too late, though, as Alice falls over the ledge of the second floor into the lake below. Alan dives in after her, and next thing he knows he wakes up in a car hanging over the edge of the cliff. You will spend the next ten hours uncovering the mysteries of a dark presence that haunts the town of Bright Falls while trying to rescue your kidnapped wife and recover your memory.
While the story of Alan Wake is fascinating in its own right, possibly more interesting is the way it is told. Throughout the game players can find manuscript pages from a novel Wake can't remember writing. The novel depicts what is happening to Wake before it happens. As such the game proudly foreshadows almost every major moment of the journey up to a half hour before it happens. While this removes some of the tension, it is a unique way to tell the story. More frustrating though, is missing a page and not fully understanding a part of the narrative. For a game almost solely driven by mystery, missing an important piece of the plot can ruin the experience. Even worse, some pages can only be found on the hellish nightmare difficulty. This wouldn't be a huge problem except most players will have tired of Alan Wake long before the end of their first playthrough, much less a second or third.
For the first couple hours Alan Wake will bind you in a web made from an intriguing narrative thread and held together by a tough gameplay fiber. But as time passes that fiber starts to slowly unravel, eventually destroying the entire web. Early on you'll be hooked to the solid gunplay and novel light mechanic. To defeat enemies in this third person shooter players must first remove the darkness from them. To do this players shine a flashlight on the enemies who will eventually burst into light, at which point you can shoot them with any weapon in your limited arsenal. The problem with this mechanic is that it is the sole gameplay hook for the entire game. Once you've defeated your first enemy you've defeated all of them. You'll eventually find a shotgun and hunting rifle in addition to your standard pistol, but these three weapons make up the entirety of your normal arsenal. In a pinch you can fire a flare gun like a rocket launcher, and towards the end of the game you'll find flash grenades that can take out a large swatch of foes, but the selection of weaponry is extremely limited, and save for the grenades are all shown in the first couple of episodes. After that you simply rinse and repeat for another five hours and the game is over. From time to time you'll fight a possessed vehicle of some sort, but for ninety percent of Alan Wake you'll be doing the same thing over and over.
Alan Wake is split into day and night segments. During the day Alan can walk about without fear of the darkness, but these short segments only serve to enhance the story and offer little in the way of compelling gameplay. During nights Alan will head into the forest to complete whatever current task is at hand. While small portions of the game take place in the city of Bright Falls or at a hospital, the vast majority of the game takes place in a forest. Now for the first couple levels this forest will amaze you. The incredible fog and wind effects imbue everything with a sense of nightmare, like the world you are walking through is more a dark dream than an unpleasant reality. The bright lights are also a highlight. Nearly blinding in the their brilliance, the lighting effects serve as an effective dichotomy to the darkness of the forest, offering tiny patches of safety in the haunted woods. But the woods eventually wear out their welcome. Like the rest of the game, the environments are a one trick pony, rarely straying away from forests and farmlands. Like the gameplay, a couple set piece moments spice of the proceedings, but you'll be unbearably bored of the oppressive forests by the time you make it to the halfway point.
Also aiding in the impressive atmosphere is the moody soundtrack and credible voice acting. While not the best in any game, and in fact not as good as Remedy's past Max Payne games, the cast does a serviceable job bringing the characters to life. The actor behind Wake especially gives a solid performance. Like the rest of the game, though, the voice acting starts to wear out its welcome as annoying characters like Wake's best friend Barry start to grate on the nerves. The soundtrack never gets old, though, and is arguably the greatest part of the game.
Also great are several discoverable radio and TV shows in the game. The TV show, called Night Springs, is a twilight zone rip-off but is highly entertaining. The radio station gives more backstory to the characters and the city of Bright Falls. Other than collecting the manuscript pages, and coffee thermoses, finding all the radio and TV shows is really the only reason to play through Alan Wake a second time. Playing it again, unfortunately, would require that you spend another 10 hours doing the same exact thing you did for the past 10. While completionists may dedicate their hours to such an endeavor, for most people a single playthrough will be sufficient. Without any multiplayer or additional content to speak of, most players will find that the wearisome single player rarely justifies a full purchase price.
Alan Wake is an odd beast. Nearly six years in development, one would expect more from the folks who brought us the incredible Max Payne series. Yes, the graphics are some of the most impressive and stylistic on Xbox 360, and yes, the story is compelling and compellingly told, but the core of a game is the gameplay, and the limited enemy and weapon selection in this game undermine the more positive elements and lead to an overall disappointing effort from the one time masters of third person shooting.
