Alan Wake

The Short


Pros
- Action/horror in the vein of Resident Evil 4 
- Stars Alan Wake, a horror writer, which is an original protagonist for a video game
- Alan Wake provides story-like narration throughout that helps set the tone and mood
- Excellent fog and lighting effects, dark forests look creepy and foreboding
- Has some genuinely interesting and weird twists in the story
- Controls are smooth and easy to pick up and play
- Voice acting is excellent
- Serious "Twin Peaks" or "Twilight Zone" vibe from this
- Breaks it up into "episodes" (like Alone in the Dark) which further pushes the "TV Show" aesthetic

Cons
- Graphics are serviceable but character models (especially faces) look pretty bad
- Insane amounts of product placements: expect to take calls on your Verizon phone and keep picking up Energizer batteries for your flashlight
- "Manuscript pages" that you find have some pretty dense, awful writing it it
- For all the gushing Alan Wake does over Stephen King, they do a poor job emulating his excellent writing style
- Meaning: the dialogue between characters is good, the narration/manuscripts/etc. is very thick. Alan needed an editor because this was obviously a rough draft
- Battles start out fun but quickly get repetitive
- Doesn't offer much in terms of varying vistas: you get mostly shadowy forests and...more shadowy forests
- Ending is a horrid cliffhanger designed to sell their DLC
- For being touted as a horror/thriller game, there is nothing scary in the entire game of Alan Wake

Welcome to Bright Falls. Alan's tweed jacket and under-hoodie aren't ready for this

The Long

Alan Wake is a compelling game with a massive development time. Like Too Human or Duke Nukem Forever, this game has been in limbo for an eternity, shifting iterations and believed to be long-dead many a time. Created by Remedy, the guys who did the first two Max Payne games, Alan Wake is (as it says on the box) a "psychological thriller." But is this love-letter to horror writers (specifically Stephen King) mixed with a weird homage to shows like Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone really worth looking into? Well...you'd better stay "A-Wake" for this review. Get it? Ha!

Alan Wake's premise is actually pretty cool. Alan is an international bestseller of horror novels (though based on the box and his actual writing he's less Stephen King and more James Patterson) who has had a serious wave of writer's block for the past two years. In an attempt to get the creative juices flowing, Alan takes a trip to the town of Bright Falls, a rural, densely forested town on an island. Unfortunately for Alan, stuff is about to get weird as he awakens to find his wife gone, half the town turned into weird beasties, and pages for an apparently unpublished manuscript that he doesn't remember writing floating around town, describing exactly what is going on. When did Alan write this? Will he be able to survive his own horror story?

If this sounds like a cool premise, it is, but the downer is that it isn't executed with much care. The story itself is pretty generic for about 90% of the game (evil dark creature lived in the lake-house Alan rented from some gypsy women, its turning the townsfolk and other inanimate objects into black darkness creatures, shoot stuff until the game ends) until it gets to the end, where it goes completely bananas and tries to pull off about six plot twists at once while failing, and then tries to also leave an open-ending (which also doesn't work). Apparently the DLC (which you have to buy, of course) that takes place immediately after the ending of Alan Wake explains a little of it, but I got one of them and it just made more unanswered questions rather than tell me what the crap was going on. For a game that so heavily pushes the "Alan is a great writer, this is his story" throughout, you'd think they'd have maybe hired an actual writer or maybe some editors to fix their own, crappy story. Or maybe it was just a rough draft. 

"'About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire...' Hey! I didn't write this!"

The actual game of Alan Wake is a standard third-person shooter affair with a slight twist. See, most of the good-natured, salt-of-the-earth people of Bright Falls have turned into crazy dark zombie people, and the darkness doesn't discriminate between living creatures and, say, tractors, so those are after Alan too. In order to defeat these monstrosities you have to first focus your flashlight on them with a high powered beam (which apparently drains the batteries like crazy; you have to constantly be pumping Energizers into them in order to stay alive) until the darkness pops off them, and then you blast them with bullets. Alan, aside from being a mediocre writer, also apparently knows how to handle any firearm with excellent proficiency, meaning the shooting controls are tight and he can also walk and shoot at the same time (take that, Resident Evil 5! Your zombie-killing specialist was just outdone by John Grisham!). He also has a nifty dodge that can be used if melee enemies get too close, resulting in a rad but oddly out-of-place slow-motion duck that looks more goofy than realistic. As it stands the controls are serviceable, the shooting is tight, and enemies seem to take just the right amount of time to go down.

The problem is that there is next to no enemy variety. Aside from the few random teleporting inanimate objects (which can be killed by just using the light, no bullets required) you basically just shoot tons of similarly looking darkness dudes for the entire course of the game. It never mixes up this formula, and while it's fun and sort of intense for the first dozen, when I was gunning down darkness lumberjack #496 I started wondering why these jerks kept blocking me from the rest of the story. Alan gets a better flashlight, better guns, etc. but it all seems redundant because all that means is the game will just throw more guys at you at once. He also gets flash-bang grenades that apparently only affect zombies and not people (since Alan doesn't get stunned by them) which are good "nukes" but seem unnecessary. You are always just fighting little people-beasties, and they never get particularly difficult.

Despite the graphics not being exceptional, they do good with the little things. It's just too bad they use the same little things over and over again. 

This is probably Alan Wake's biggest flaw: it's repetitive. Which also shows in its locals: you spend about 80% of the game wandering through a dark, foggy forest path, glancing around you to make sure Taken (aka the zombies) aren't coming at you from behind some trees, shining your light all about frantically, etc. There are so many freaking foggy forests in this game. Yeah, I get that he's in forest-land USA based on the setting, but couldn't we have mixed it up a bit? You visit a sort-of trailer park at the beginning; why couldn't we go through there after it's been dark? Or more farms? (though it does have a lot of farms, too) Or...anything?

There are a few unique places, like a mental health hospital and a sort of "cabin" district, and you do get to walk through the town after it's been made "evil," but most of the game is shooting the same Taken people in the same-looking forest. Dull.

Running to safe points while being ambushed is pretty intense, and they use light well in this game

Graphically, Alan Wake does some things really well and others just ok. The aforementioned foggy forests do look quite good, and what Alan Wake lacks in technical prowess it makes up in setting and sticking to a theme. Light looks especially great, with the red/orange flares from the flare gun that billow up illuminated smoke looking damned impressive, even after the tenth one. Everything with the light looks exceptional (as would be expected, since light plays such a key role in this game), from how your beam darts across the tops of cornfields or sticks on some fog close to you. That part of the game is great.

The not so great part is when you start looking close. Textures are generally bland, with side objects such as rocks and walls looking pretty crappy if you get up close to them (though usually they are layered by both darkness and fog, so I guess it's sort of forgivable). Characters are modeled ok but their faces look horrid, with the lips hardly ever matching the voices and the whole thing looking stilted. Again, it wouldn't have been such a problem if they hadn't been banking so much on their story, but when your script isn't very great, your story's ending makes no sense, and your means of presenting it (the graphics) are choppy at best, you have a problem.

The flares still look cool, and look cooler after they've hit

The game has lots of little things that are close to being great but just barely don't make it. Alan's narration over the whole thing is a great touch and is very well voiced, but I really wish they'd actually read the ham-fisted dialogue that he's spouting off. Similarly, the manuscript pages you find blowing in the eternal forests read equally thick and bloated. It's like somebody thought a bunch of similes and over-description was all one needed to write a good book, while completely missing how to apply these tools to actually write something good. The fact you have to constantly reload your flashlight is annoying but makes sense gameplay-wise, but why the heck are all the batteries Energizer branded, and lying all over a forest? The collectables, the coffee thermoses, are also just lying in the woods. Does Alan drink those when he picks them up? No wonder he's seeing zombies; he's on some sort of weird trip. The Verizon phone placement is also obnoxious, but it anything on disc is easily trumped by one of the first lines in the DLC (where a character calls you and literally asks "Can you hear me now?"). Rampant product placement is annoying but forgivable if it makes sense. Here, it's just stupid. 

Which sort of brings me to my last point: Alan Wake is a "thriller" game that isn't particularly thrilling, scary, horrific, or otherwise. You might have guessed that with it's "T for Teen" rating they couldn't exactly get away with gore-based horror, but plenty of games and movies have been classified in the "teen" rating and still pulled off some pretty serious scares (The Ring comes to mind). Because Alan is such an excellent shot and everything is layered with that corny narration, the game comes off more as silly rather than scary. And yeah, there are lots of dudes coming at you at times, but I never had that white-knuckle, nail-biting mixture of dread and tension that was so persistent in games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, which Alan Wake clearly is trying to emulate. You come for the story, wade through the quagmire-ific gameplay to the next plot point, and then the game ends. There is no horror here. 

I've also never seen an author have cardboard cutouts made of himself to push his books. Vain much, Alan?

As it stands, Alan Wake does well on its aesthetic, even if it misses the mark of being a "psychological thriller." The story is compelling despite it's stupid, obnoxious ending, and while the shooting is good there is just far too much of it. It's hard to take a polarizing stance in either direction with Alan Wake: I can't hate it because it still is a very solid game at its core, and I can't love it because it does so many little things wrong. If you are into third-person shooters and love foggy woods and want to see a rather unique take on familiar genre trappings, you could do a lot worse than Alan Wake. But if you were expecting a "psychological thriller" several years in the making, you might want to wait for the paperback. I mean the sequel. Or something. That joke didn't work.

You can grab the game pretty easily for $10-15, which if you are interested is a decent enough price to jump right in. Just know what you are and aren't getting, lower your expectations a bit, and you'll probably do fine. This game also recently came out on PC, which includes all the DLC, and considering the graphics are a bit better (and it supports 3D cards) I'd consider that the optimum way to play, if you can get a controller hooked up.

Three out of five stars, Alan. You didn't write a bestseller, but at least you pulled out of the midlist.