Posted on: May 29, 2012
Gregsylvania
Games: 40 Reviews: 8
Effectively DLC with Little to Add
After their super-serious ode to the likes of Twin Peaks and Stephen King's inanimate object horror oeuvre, Remedy's release of more fantastical episodes and DLC packs has been a welcome, but frustrating design switch. In three episodes, the story has gained little progress, especially when you consider that American Nightmare is not considered canon by the developers. it's frustrating to see an arc that hasn't closed, just to have it open new arcs that supposedly aren't part of the one that went unfinished. This time around, Alan is trapped by The Darkness in a few distinct, dream-like locations based around a Route 66 Southwest USA atmosphere. Alan finds himself stuck in a loop between three different small, semi-open-world maps. He is meanwhile heckled and tormented by Alan's doppelganger Mr. Scratch, a personified embodiment of the Darkness, who is posing as Alan's double in the real world. Scratch is interesting. He's a violent sociopath who poses as Alan in the real world, meanwhile taunting Alan about how bad he's screwing everything up in the real world, and plans to eventually kill Alice, Alan's wife. Alan's mission is to break out of the Groundhog's Day-styled repetition of the three zones by performing different fetch quests in each in order to free himself from the ordeal. In each location, Alan meets a different girl. While they have good voice acting and passible dialogue, they're each poorly-written and uninteresting compared to the main game's vibrant cast of memorable characters. They pretty much serve as a way of structuring the Nightmare's plot, providing little else besides initiating fetch quests for you. These fetch quests make up the main gameplay structure of the game. Odds are, you'll beat some enemies, meet one of the location's girls, have to pick up a few items, beat up some enemies, mix all of the doohickeys together, then progress to the next area. This goes in a loop later on in the game, where you found out your previously did something wrong, then have to come back to the location, and do another fetch quest, up to three times per location. It's a boring grind that just serves as a gameplay-lengthener and a way to get more out of the amusing interaction between Scratch and Alan. Fighting is the same as last time. Use light on enemy, then shoot enemy. The only difference this time is that since you're in a dream, the game throws out believability in favor of crazy action and a wider arsenal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but without the tense atmosphere of the original game, combat is just combat, with no real emotional investment beyond "kill the enemies and get some stuff." Alan gets more guns this time, the caveat being that he has only his basic flashlight, and that guns can only be unlocked by collecting the various scattered pages of his manuscript scattered about the levels. The guns get bigger and crazier, but are still limited to just firearms, giving you new weapons like automatic shotguns, assault rifles, and even a nail gun. These carry over to multiplayer, which is a co-op affair. I didn't put much time into it, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on it, but it seemed solid enough. Overall, this game is worth picking up if you're a die hard for the series, but given how dull some of it is, and how repetitious it gets, some casual observers of the series may be a little put off.
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