Alan Wake: Review

You play as Alan Wake. A troubled writer on supposed vacation with your wife until she whips out a typewriter, you go off and throw a hissy fit while she gets taken by the dark and your search for your wife begins. Just another typical day for a best selling author.


SYNOPSIS

Bright Falls is your choice of destination for your holiday with your loving wife Alice as you seem to be encountering some sort of writers block and need to get away from it all.

The storyline goes that you have to get a key from the local diner but you get a key from a mystery woman shrouded in funeral clothes to a lake that..... *dun dun dun*, doesn't exist. There you discover that your wife has another agenda when you discover that she has brought with her, a typewriter in the hope that you can find inspiration from the surroundings.

You then get pissed off, walk outside and Alice, your wife, starts screaming and you rush back to discover that she's been taken from the darkness... of which she has a terrible fear of.

You wake up after a week long blackout in a car accident and have to make your way through the forest fighting off strange enemies possessed by the dark with a couple of bullets and a flashlight. Lather rinse and repeat.

VISUALS

Visually Alan Wake is superb and the lighting effects in the water are unbelievable when you come across them first on the barge that brings you to the small village of Bright Falls.

Once you start the game for the first time you are prompted to adjust your display settings. It might be worth keeping the display low but not too low as later on in the game you come across brighter and brighter flashlights and mixed with bright lamps it can get a bit difficult to see where you're going sometimes.

The vast terrain and general surroundings are absolutely stunning and is a huge open world experience as you delve further and further into the great unknown.



Cutscenes are very very well detailed and even better when viewed in HD.


AUDIO


The sound quality in the game is amazing from the voice to the soundtrack. Great voice acting and the various whispers in the wind while you're making your way through the dark forest is very very eerie especially when you've got the sound turned up and running through a surround sound system.

The various distorted voices of your enemies A.K.A "The Taken" are haunting too especially the mindless babble from some of them.


GAMEPLAY


So how does it play? Well, it plays very very well. Controls are very fluid and quite responsive. Overall gameplay is good but a little bit repetitive at times.

Walk for ages, get ambushed from behind, blast torchlight to weaken enemies, shoot until they explode into fireworks. Repeat by a billion times.

The game lost a bit of its suspense at times when you could pinpoint the exact moment when the camera would pan around to show enemies coming at you from behind. The first couple of times I got a bit of a fright especially when there's a ton of enemies coming at you from all angles when all you have is a torchlight and 4 bullets.

At times Alan Wake reminds me of Resident Evil 4 with its claustrophobic nature with tons of enemies coming at you from all angles with little or no ammo.



At times it's a challenge when there's a swarm of enemies after you while you attempt to get to your safe haven..... i.e a street lamp while you brandish your slow recharging flashlight with no battery packs in the hope that they'd piss off.

The game itself is good bar a few things:

1) It's too repetitive. Walk through darkness, get attacked, push buttons, start generators etc.

2) The game is too short. 6 chapters is all the game has. Bit annoying seeing as the game took an age to be released. There will be DLC for it but why not include it into the game? They had the time.... Damn money hungry bastards.

And finally my one big gripe with the game.



Why?? Just why? These coffee thermoses add nothing to the game at all yet I couldn't resist just collecting them.

Anyway moving onto the positives.

1) Expansive map

2) Visually amazing

3) Sound is superb

4) Brilliant storyline

5) Claustrophobic feel when you've no ammo really adds a superb aspect to the game.

6) Pieces of manuscript you encounter on the way.


VERDICT

Overall it is a good game but it's extremely disappointing that the game is so short. Yes, there'll be DLC soon but I don't understand why the game couldn't have these already included.

- Gameplay is repetitive.
- Collectable coffee thermoses adds nothing to the game.

+ Stunning visuals.
+ Sound quality.
+ Storyline.

Overall I'd give it a 7/10.

I bought it and wish I had just rented it but had no idea how short it really was going to be.