Alan Wake: First Impressions
Sup people! So I tried Alan Wake for the first time tonight, having borrowed it from the library. It's pretty bad. The game starts off with a quote from Stephen King, saying how nightmares don't make sense, and that's why they're good - how the mystery makes it good. I groaned in my mind, thinking of the philosophy behind the television show "Lost," - how they just pour questions and more questions into the show and answer questions with more questions. It is very unsatisfying.
So Alan Wake's graphics are certainly not top-tier, but at least it doesn't look like Deadly Premonitions. The setting is nice: an out-of-the way place dominated by nature - a perfect place for a getaway for a writer such as Alan Wake. I really prefer natural environments and levels in video games, so this is a good thing. Unfortunately, the levels are like those in most modern video games, meaning they are extremely linear, shepherding you, the player, from one point to the next.
From the first act of the game, categorized as an "episode," like in a television show, I had a deadly premonition that this game would be disappointing. First of all, it was a nightmare. You were playing a nightmare. The whole idea behind nightmares in artistic mass media (movies and video games) kind of pisses me off. Nightmares are not reality; they are only based in reality, so one can discount everything that goes on in a nightmare as false and irrelevant, or at the very least, unimportant. In the case of this video game, you can try to figure out the motives and story from this first episode, but in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, "Why bother?"
Okay; so the story is kind of wack, but is the gameplay at least good? No. For a story-driven horror game like this, combat took way too much importance in the flow of the game. If it was at least a fair fight between the player and the enemies, it'd be forgivable, but of course, this game takes a nod from the survival horror genre and gives you less bullets than you need. The camera perspective is in the third person, à la Resident Evil 4, but instead of Alan being on the left, he is on the right, kind of like how Sheva was on the right in Resident Evil 5. Fine, you say; it is just a change of side, right? Wrong. The camera is much too far away, and there is no targeting reticule. Thus you must aim with the flashlight, and then shoot with the gun, from a further distance than you would in games like Resident Evil 4 and 5, Gears of War, or Dead Space. Don't forget that you get little ammunition, and often multiple enemies will fight you at once. You can run away, and you have a horrible "ducking" move, but these enemies are persistent, and will chase you down and kill you.
This seems like an ambitious game that could've been great if they didn't try to turn this into a cinematic action game, and made it more of a methodical adventure game. I think either way, it would've had low sales, but at least the original vision of the game would have remained intact. My theory on this game's numerous delays is just this. They wanted to make a horror adventure game with sick graphics, but they saw Resident Evil 5, Dead Space, Alone in the Dark, etc. and took some extra time to redo the whole game and make it into an action game. It was a bad decision, but I don't blame the developers; it was probably the publisher Microsoft that pushed the change.
So Alan Wake's graphics are certainly not top-tier, but at least it doesn't look like Deadly Premonitions. The setting is nice: an out-of-the way place dominated by nature - a perfect place for a getaway for a writer such as Alan Wake. I really prefer natural environments and levels in video games, so this is a good thing. Unfortunately, the levels are like those in most modern video games, meaning they are extremely linear, shepherding you, the player, from one point to the next.
From the first act of the game, categorized as an "episode," like in a television show, I had a deadly premonition that this game would be disappointing. First of all, it was a nightmare. You were playing a nightmare. The whole idea behind nightmares in artistic mass media (movies and video games) kind of pisses me off. Nightmares are not reality; they are only based in reality, so one can discount everything that goes on in a nightmare as false and irrelevant, or at the very least, unimportant. In the case of this video game, you can try to figure out the motives and story from this first episode, but in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, "Why bother?"
Okay; so the story is kind of wack, but is the gameplay at least good? No. For a story-driven horror game like this, combat took way too much importance in the flow of the game. If it was at least a fair fight between the player and the enemies, it'd be forgivable, but of course, this game takes a nod from the survival horror genre and gives you less bullets than you need. The camera perspective is in the third person, à la Resident Evil 4, but instead of Alan being on the left, he is on the right, kind of like how Sheva was on the right in Resident Evil 5. Fine, you say; it is just a change of side, right? Wrong. The camera is much too far away, and there is no targeting reticule. Thus you must aim with the flashlight, and then shoot with the gun, from a further distance than you would in games like Resident Evil 4 and 5, Gears of War, or Dead Space. Don't forget that you get little ammunition, and often multiple enemies will fight you at once. You can run away, and you have a horrible "ducking" move, but these enemies are persistent, and will chase you down and kill you.
This seems like an ambitious game that could've been great if they didn't try to turn this into a cinematic action game, and made it more of a methodical adventure game. I think either way, it would've had low sales, but at least the original vision of the game would have remained intact. My theory on this game's numerous delays is just this. They wanted to make a horror adventure game with sick graphics, but they saw Resident Evil 5, Dead Space, Alone in the Dark, etc. and took some extra time to redo the whole game and make it into an action game. It was a bad decision, but I don't blame the developers; it was probably the publisher Microsoft that pushed the change.
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