Not a bad game, but it's not a "great" (8.5!) by any means.
User Rating: 7 | Alan Wake PC
I had high hopes for this game. I love story driven games, with twists - fused with action, but where the narrative is the plot component rather than hard action. In that respect, Alan Wake delivered what I was expecting. I won't get into the plot at all because truth be told I didn't quite get it - maybe I lost interest early on and that just put me into auto-pilot, and after the 1st chapter I also stopped collecting/reading the story pages. Essentially, I totally get the approach but I got really annoyed with the repetitiveness of nearly everything in this game. The atmosphere was constantly the same - the "action" was cookie-cutter stuff - which is a critical issue given that action was, actually, a little too prevalent so for sure it should have been spiced up a little. I really didn't like how in one too many fight sequences just before the "attack", the camera panned out to show the over-all scene, but by the time the camera jumped back into the normal perspective, I lost the sense of direction, and then by the time I turned around to aim on the bad guys, they were already there - I just felt that the crappy camera work was sabotaging my game play - in my books that a critical no-no! On the other hand, the graphics are delicious (albeit the wow factor is really short lived because it's all pretty much the same).
As far as the narrative is concerned, it has nothing on Indigo Prophecy (which is a real masterpiece on its own, but more so when compared to other games). I agree that Alan Wake is certainly worth playing, but I simply can't agree with the "great" rating it's receiving. If you want to experience a great game somewhat on parallel lines with this game, try Indigo Prophecy...it's nowhere on par with AW in terms of graphics/audio, but the plot more than makes up for that. Thanks for reading.
