Many years ago "Alan Wake" was announced as coming to the PC and Xbox 360. The short trailer I remember watching had Alan running from a tornado as it destroyed the enviroment in an impressive manner. This was game was one of the reasons that I wanted to get a 360. As time went by I began to think that like many games this had become a piece of vaporware. Oh a trailer would be shown here and information leaked over here but it seemed that it was always just out of reach. But after many years of development and several shifts in design (not to mention the cancels PC version) "Alan Wake" has made its way into my Xbox. Here are my thoughts on what is hopefully the begining of a new series of games.
First and foremost I want it to be known that "Alan Wake" isn't perfect but was it worth the long wait... why yes it was. It starts off with a quote by Stephen King explaining that what you aren't told is often more frighting than what you are and that answers aren't always forthcoming. This is a nice homage seeing that the title cribs alot from the formentioned writer. Alan, being a writer himself, has had a two year bought with writers block. He and his wife set off to Bright Falls for some R & R and the plot takes off from there.
Simply someone or something has taken his wife and it up to Alan to save her and unravel the myteries of the town and his missing memory. Yes, one of the most often used plot elements amnesia, is used here. See after his wife is taken the game shifts 7 days ahead and Alan is left to wonder what occured in his lost week. Pages of a novel he doesn't remember writing seemingly tell of both past event and future ones. Now armed with a trusty flashlight (brought to you by ingame advetising) and what ever weapons he can get his hands on, Alan must combat the darkness.
Which brings us to the next part of the story... the combat. Do not be fooled into thinking that this is a adventure game. Combat is one of the corner stones of this title. Lucky for us it is pretty compatant. Aim your flashlight at an enemy, destroy the darkness cover them and shot. Then repeat. This makes for a suprisingly intenense time (Nightmare mode especialy). The one thing that keeps it from being fantastic is that towards episode 5 and 6 the combat becomes somewhat perdictable with the same enemies. Still not enough to make the game less enjoyable.
The story is devided into episodes much like a series of tv. This format creates a great opportuniy for Remedy to pace the game in such a way that just as soon as you get tired of a setting or happening it over. This leads into a cliffhanger for the episode that makes you not want to put down the controller. And as for to story itself, well not the greatest yarn ever told, is mostly interesting the entire game. The voice acting is good throughout. Though the manuscript pages found throughout the game (most are found when diverging from the main path) balance the spooky and the camp that horror novels tend to straddle. All I can say is that I was completly engrossed and am ready for Season 2 right now.
The game looks good. Sure there is a bit of wonkiness at times but damn, that lighting system is sure pretty to look at. The charater models are well done and other than the weird mouth movements (I have heard that this may be fixed for the future DLC) that sometimes just look bizarre. Some of the set pieces seem so full of things that I can't help but wonder that if they are from the time that the game was going to be a open world title. That was before the streamlining came into effect. "Uncharted 2" did better but "Alan Wake" does it almost as well. There were a few times that I stopped and just looked at the world in front of me.
If you can't tell I enjoyed the game. I do wish that the enemies would have veried a little more. Or that the story had come together just a little more at the end (that is not to say that I didn't like the end, quite the opposite). But this was far better than I thought it was going to be. And by god I had a good time and isn't that what games are about.
Everyone who owns a Xbox 360 owes it to themselves to at least try out Remedy's labor of love. I would say that most of you won't be disappointed in what you find.