Alan Wake isn’t short on ambition. This survival horror title bookends each of its chapters with drama that could stand up against a television thriller. It’s during these points when I get really jazzed about the game.
And then it falls apart when I actually have to play it.
At its core, it is an action/survival horror title not unlike Resident Evil 4. Armed with limited resources, it’s on you to keep moving forward while dispatching of these creepy beings that have an affliction to light.
While I love how it tells its tale at the beginning and end of each chapter, the vast majority of the game involves you simply running through the forest, shooting these beings. The moment-to-moment combat isn’t all that interesting, and there’s way too much of it. For every 5 minutes of bookend, you have to slog through hours of running through the forest and killing off the same few enemy types repeatedly. After the first 30 minutes of the first episode, I grew tired of this formula. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change much from the three episodes I played, which just got painful by the end of it.
For all of the cool things it does with its storytelling and presentation, I cannot get over how the action is paced or how much of it there is. I really wish that its core compulsion loop was more interesting, or it peppered in more story beats within the action beyond the collection of manuscripts. I know that this is a critically acclaimed game, but I found most of it boring to play through. Chalk this one up to just not being my cup of tea.
In Third Person 