Alan Wake

Story is very twilight zone and is very cool in a mind-bending sort of way, so it's not your average horror story. The gameplay is more third person shooter with a "banishment" system where you use light to expose an enemy's weakness or remove curses from animated objects. It works well and is fun with only a few points in the game holding it back due to things like overly long levels that stretch encounters out a bit too thin or a lack of enemy variety. The biggest flaw in the game is the driving sections between levels. During these sections, don't get out to explore and just keep driving unless you're really intent on gathering collectibles. It's well worth finding all of the TVs though because the mini-Twilight Zone episodes they show are pretty cool. If you like Alan Wake, don't forget to play American Nightmare! It has the opposite problem of playing much better but has too few maps and meaningful encounters, but it's great if you just like Wake's gampelay and the story is still cool.

So this is a horror-story driven action-adventure game. You play as a guy called Alan Wake, a writer, you go to a place called "Bright Falls" on a vacation, but thins go .... wrong. Now the premise and develpments in this game are quite interesting and are its strongest points. I dont want to spoil anything, but I must say I found the presentation quite original. The story progresses through cutscenes, in-game dialogue, notes and some others things. It does have some loose ends both throughout the story and during its ending, so I cant really praise it too highly. Voice acting and sound are good. Graphics are dated, theyre not bad, just noticeable for a 10 year old game. What is pretty weak here is the gameplay mechanics and controls. This game is made for consoles and it shows. Having 1 button for both sprint and dodge should tell you what to expect here. In regards to gameplay, it works fine while its focus is to progress the story. But as soon as it puts an accent on action it shows how limited it is in its scope and that its not really that fun. This occurs in the later 3 episodes when they start giving you a lot more guns and you have to fight way more often and much larger groups. I didnt have any issues for the most part, I always had enough weaponry and tools. But it just felt kinda forced, like they ran out of meaningful storytelling that they could do. In the bonus missions the gameplay becomes especially painful without a clear story-arc to sustain it. I didnt even bother finishing the last bonus chapter as I kept diyng on a pseudo-hamster wheel. So if youre in it for the story, you will probably get some joy out of it. Otherwise you wont find much.

Incredibly comprehensive video review of everything Alan Wake that came before Alan Wake 2, from American Nightmare to Control to Quantum Break https://youtu.be/A7r2s-mUZ94 Just an incredibly paced, deeply reverential but also original take on so many great horror tropes that would explode into a whole universe of ideas eventually.

really great game

I bought Alan Wake 2, and before playing it wanted to play the first part first. I love the story, locations, soundtrack, simply everything, except for the stability. In 2025, on my newest rig, which is way overpowered for this old game, it keeps warning me that my computer is too slow, renders at most 60 fps, which would be OK with me, but the worst it is that it's badly stuttering about once per second. Both playtime and cutscenes run smoothly most of the time except for one noticeable sturred per second.