you know when you meet a cool dude and you hang out with him for a while and just chill, and he’s really awesome, and you become like best friends, and he’s like ‘hey I have a brother, you should meet him’ and you’re like ‘sick,’ and then you meet his brother and his brother’s this awkward teenager desperately emulating him in an attempt to be cool? alan wake is that awkward younger brother.
you might expect more from remedy, makers of the first two max payne games (both certified good games). i certainly expected more. luckily i am used to disappointment
so the game opens in this sick dream sequence where you’re like running from this crazed axe murderer and you have to get to this lighthouse and you’re running away and its actually pretty scary because you don’t have effective weapons. then the fucking SUN comes down and is like ‘alan, you gotta use a fucking flashlight, here take mine’ and then the sun gives you his flashlight, and you’re like ‘AWESOME.’ you should stop playing here because
when you get to the lighthouse the dream ends and a horribly textured face which is apparently your wife’s is like hey alan, wake up. and then you walk around for a while and nothing happens. then you start to realize this game might be bad. because it’s a game. but you aren’t doing anything.
remember that first video game you played as a child? you know the one. maybe it was doom, or mario. whatever it was, it got you into gaming. now do you remember the part where you walked around a town for 20 minutes getting blasted in the face with terrible stephen king fanfiction? no? because that’s not gameplay
but i digress. that is all i will say about plot. which is actually quite a bit for me, but i only do it because there is so little gameplay to write about. you get three guns. ever. you also get a flare and a flashbang grenade, the latter of which instantly kills anything, so basically it’s a grenade, except it can’t hurt you, so basically it turns into an ‘oh shit’ button, and when the game gives you 16 ‘oh shit’ buttons in one level, you know that game balance is a forgotten art.
there’s three kinds of enemies in alan wake. you should go back and reread that number. in case you can’t read it was 3. that’s so few. there’s ‘light’ enemies who throw things at you and hit you if they get close. there’s ‘heavy’ enemies who have no ranged attack, but can charge and absorb a lot of damage. then there’s ‘boss’ enemies who are just ‘light’ enemies that run around really fast for 5 seconds before stopping to politely let you shoot them. that’s it.
the only innovation in alan wake is that you have to use a flashlight to lower enemy shields before shooting them with guns. think an entire game where you’re using the plasma pistol / smg combo from halo 2. only you have to reload the plasma pistol. yeah, it fucking sucks. it’s a one-trick pony. that’s actually an insult to ponies. ponies will sometimes surprise you. alan wake is more like a brick. it just is what it is.
actually the final boss is a tornado, that was surprising. that was actually kind of cool. but you just shoot it with the flaregun until it dies, i mean its not like its hard, and honestly when you introduce the element of being able to kill a tornado it basically just turns into any other Final Boss whose sole schtick was to throw shit at you.
speaking of which, did anyone ever play Psi-Ops? that game had a boss who only threw stuff at you. that game was AWESOME. i should write about that game next
