InsaneBear

Review: Alan Wake

Score: Meh
Difficulty played on: Normal
Time to beat: About 10 hours
Loved the most: Spectacular soundtrack.
Hated the most: The tedious repetition which burdens a game where everything looks and feels the same.

After years of delays pushed Alan Wake out of the public eye, Remedy (Max Payne franchise) finally got their act together and delivered one of the Xbox 360′s most anticipated exclusives in a year of several great exclusives. And given the unique premise of Alan Wake–we play as a writer who is whisked into the events of one of his own stories–the potential was there for something truly special. I would expect as much from the studio that unleashed “bullet time” on the world of video games. But unfortunately, video games are not books, and one cannot delay publication by several years without design choices showing their age. Alan Wake is a brutally linear game that fails miserably when it comes to merging narrative and gameplay. Worse yet, the gameplay amounts to one identical encounter after the other, with no variety of worth in the entire package. So after all these years of anticipation, Remedy’s latest title, while worth renting for the unique story, will likely fade into obscurity, not unlike the trashy pulp churned out by today’s best selling novelists.

I’ll be honest with you here, I’m trying to remember exactly how Alan Wake opens so I can segue nicely into the back story but it’s just a blur of crazy nightmares with shadow people, restricted wandering in a New York apartment from three years in the past, and a very brief introduction to some of the residents of Bright Falls, the town in which the game takes place. So yeah, the fact that I can’t even recall something as important as the introduction sort of speaks to how poorly this game’s narrative is pieced together. This careless structure is utterly inexcusable when one considers how Alan Wake is divided into six “episodes,” complete with “Previously on Alan Wake…” recaps and musical outros. I just don’t understand how a developer can mold their game’s story around the format of a TV show, a proven story-telling medium, and completely fail to embrace all the strengths of that medium. It’s like Remedy adopted this useless gimmick just so they could throw five cliff-hangers in their game but they never paid any attention to things like pacing or development of supporting characters. It’s such a missed opportunity.

Make no mistake about it, behind the smoke and mirrors of the Stephen King-esque story, Alan Wake‘s narrative boils down to saving the princess. The mystery that’s presented in the beginning is little more than an excuse to send you on your action hero adventure. And despite that fact that you play as a writer, who openly admits to having never fired a gun before, the story that the gameplay tells may as well be any other third-person shooter’s. Replace mercenaries with shadow monsters and shields with “the darkness” and you have Alan Wake.

But I’ll be damned if the game doesn’t look fantastic the first time you encounter “The Taken,” as your enemies are referred to throughout the adventure. A masterful blend of shadows, lighting, fog, and heavy foliage radiate an eerie and unsettling atmosphere that turns the surrounding environment into a ominous entity, brought to life by hair-raising bumps in the night. There is a psychologically suffocating presence to the air that keeps you on the linear trail without the need for invisible walls.

The enemies look just as foreboding the first time around, what with black shadows melting off of them like the choking soot of a menacing chimney. They sound pretty demonic too thanks to a nice reverb effect on their voices. That just makes it even cooler to see their dark cloaks spark away in slow motion as you ignite a flare with 360 degrees of camera panning awesomeness. But the problem is that no matter how bad ass these things look, you’ll grow tired of them half-way through the game. The environments are practically indistinguishable from each other and there are about three different enemy types throughout.

This disgusting lack of variety applies to the mission design and gameplay mechanics too. Pretty much every objective comes down to moving from point A to point B in the dark, fending off a few ambushes on the way, and then encountering some sort of mini-boss. And for as interesting and innovative as the use of light is in this game is (I can’t think of any other games that use flashlights as weapons and street-lights as safe havens), it never amounts to more than burning away a foe’s shadow shield before capping him. Environmental puzzles centered around the light-mechanic could have been pretty awesome and intense, but there are none to speak of. There aren’t any good chase sequences based around the mechanic either. Hell, even the boss battles equate to shooting enough flares at an enemy to kill it. There’s no creativity to speak of when it comes to this interesting spin on lighting in video games.

What that means is that the core of the game revolves around getting ambushed by enemies, trying to burn their shields off before you get attacked from off screen (because that’s the best way to put challenge into a game), and shooting them with a small arsenal of moderately satisfying guns. Alan Wake is severely lacking in creative and satisfying applications of violence and could probably take a few tips from the guys at Epic (Gears of War). Seriously, would it have been that hard to allow the player to jam a flare into a Taken’s mouth and kick this living torch into a group of his buddies? I can’t tell you how annoying it is to light a flare with so much cinematic style only to see enemies cower at the edge of the light until it burns out. If Alan Wake can be an expert marksman despite never touching a firearm before, why not just take the badassery all the way and give him a flame-thrower cigarette and can of hair-spray? But no, we get the boring sequence of “shine light, shoot, shoot, kill.”

Whenever the game does try to spice up the mundane equation it tends to feel out of place and underdeveloped. There are a few driving segments that feel clunky, look bad, and are just generally boring. There are also collectable coffee thermoses and pages to the mysterious manuscript that Mr. Wake has no recollection of writing. The coffee thermoses are nothing more than a video game cliche that kill any sense of a rush and the game would have been better off without them. The manuscript pages are actually kind of cool in that the events of said manuscript are coming true in the game, so finding pages can foreshadow attacks to come or clarify past happenings. It’s just too bad that my imagination created more tension with the foreshadowing than the actual, predictable, and boring events. Come to think of it, for supposedly being a horror game, I can’t recall one scare in the ten hours I spent with it. Remedy rarely even tries. Oh, and that makes me think of these stupid three-second hallucinations Alan constantly has that are played as pre-rendered cut-scenes instead of being projected in game, so your immersion is shattered again and again like a snitch’s leg bones in prison.

The narrative as a whole is a separate entity from the gameplay side of things. That’s really a shame, as Alan Wake‘s atmosphere begs for an in-engine story that keeps the player sealed in the game-world. Almost all plot-advancement takes place within cut-scenes and feels very disjointed from the actual interactive parts of the experience. How am I to believe that Alan Wake is a scared writer with no idea what he’s doing but something worth fighting for when I play as a cool and collected killer who recognizes the difference between the illusion of danger and true danger? Visually stunning set-pieces might wow other players, but I just can’t forget that I’m playing a video game and that the developers wouldn’t kill my character with one of the trains or boats that are hurled hundreds of feet from the sky and directly in front of me. How convenient that the dark presence who wants to destroy me and can rip trees from their roots and chuck them three hundred feet into the air comes up just short every time. Oh, and I also realize that if you take my weapon from me (which happens way too often and in very contrived ways), well then I’m probably not going to be attacked. Resident Evil 5 has more tension than this.

And as long as I’m talking about the disjointed nature of Alan Wake, I may as well mention how terrible the day-time parts of the game are. They are few and far between, but on occasion the story will have you meeting Bright Falls residents in the safety of day light. Firstly, the graphics look pretty lackluster in the light of day. But more importantly, this would have been the ideal time to open up the world to Alan and let the player wander around on their own, meeting and learning about the residents of Bright Falls. I mean, if Twin Peaks is supposed to be an inspiration for Alan Wake then you’d think development of an interesting supporting cast might have come up in the board meetings. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, there is no such development. Characters are never focused on longer than than the plot requires and we don’t really get to know anybody beyond their small roles in Alan’s story. In fact, some of the characters who play larger roles in the story never even have their motivations explained. Everybody is just a tool to advance a pretty cliche story (although it is different for video games).

What the game really comes down to is its story. If you enjoy the story, then you’ll probably enjoy the game. Well, actually, you’ll probably still hate the monotonous gameplay, but you’ll at least enjoy the culmination of it all. If you think the story is under-explained mystery for the sake of mystery, with poor pacing and no character development beyond Alan himself, and especially if you hate cliff-hanger endings that don’t really resolve much, well then, Alan Wake‘s probably not for you. A lot of people are really reading into this game’s narrative and finding deep insights on what it means to create something from nothing and on the nature of story-telling, but I just see a lot of filler and underdeveloped characters. And God almighty, “evil” does not count as a motivation in my book! The only credit I’ll give this tale is that the ending makes you think, which is a rarity in video games. Granted, it doesn’t make you think about any relevant social messages or moral revelations–it’s more like thinking about what the hell just happened and whether or not it makes sense–but it’s thinking nonetheless.

When all is said and done, I simply cannot recommend buying this game at full retail price. It’s relatively short to begin with, and even if the story is worth another play-through for clarification purposes, the game mechanics are so trite that I can’t see myself enduring another ten hours. There are a few things Alan Wake gets right–fantastic atmosphere, a great soundtrack, somewhat memorable characters, and a new spin on lighting–but the total experience is forgettable. The best way to sum up my feelings on this title is probably the fact that my favorite parts were the musical outros at the end of every chapter. That was some great use of licensed music accompanying a static screen. I especially liked David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to close things out, although I could have just been happy to beat the game after a terribly underwhelming boss fight. Don’t buy into the hype. Alan Wake is an average writer at best.

Author: Cody

Tags: alan wake, microsoft, remedy, review, xbox 360