April 16, 2024
Alan, snap out of it!
The first Alan Wake entry disappointed me quite a bit.
Despite having a strong narrative and atmosphere, the game felt like a slog to me due to how extremely repetitive its mechanics are.
Good atmosphere and detailed locations, mysterious and labyrinthine forests.
High-quality Spanish dubbing.
The episode where we arrive at the brothers’ farm is very fun, innovating a bit compared to other parts of the game.
The game is very repetitive. There is little variety in enemy types, predominantly shadow men (normal, large, fast), flying objects (wtf!) and sometimes birds. All enemies are eliminated in the same way.
There is a lot of filler combat that adds nothing new, making it boring.
The movement feels heavy and when starting to run, it always makes a strange crouching motion.
The vehicle driving is very imprecise and not enjoyable.
The gameplay throughout the game is very similar:
The level design seemed weak and boring to me, with levels sometimes too long. Even on hard difficulty, there are flares and ammunition in every corner.
When finding manuscript parts, you always have to pause the game and go to the menu to read them there. Since they are narrated, it would have been great to open them while playing.
The collectible items, coffee thermoses, confused me for a while thinking they repaired some kind of character stat.
The character gets tired very frequently, something that in my opinion slows down the gameplay and doesn’t add much, rather it makes it tedious.
It feels like an overproduced game. It’s evident that a high budget was invested, but the mechanics are so repetitive that they ruin the experience.
The beginning of the game is very slow and the end becomes unnecessarily long and tedious.