I haven’t been updating due to being very busy but i have been managing to fit in some games. Not as many as i would like but enough to keep me ticking over. Recently i have been playing AVP, Alan Wake, Dear Esther and battling a Minecraft addiction. I think it would probably be a good idea to split those games up into different posts so here this one will be focussed on Alan Wake.
In short, I liked it. It grew on me a lot as i played through it. I liked the torch mechanic, it reminded me a lot of the recent ghostbusters game. If you havent played it yet (you should), the enemies are protected by darkness and you have to "burn" the darkness off with a torch or flare or other light source. It works nicely and has a satisfying feel to it.
Great atmosphere in the game and a lot of cool big wow moments. I think the only thing i didn’t like was Alan Wake. The Character himself i mean. he was moody and arrogant and just.. well... not very nice and kinda stuck in the middle of the situation. I tend to prefer games where the "hero" is a blank page you can fill in with your own character and project your ideas into who they are; Halo, Half Life, Dead Space etc..
For a game about a writer and the story... i couldn’t quite tell you what the story was. I mean, i feel closure at completing it and i know how it ended.. but i cant explain "what happened" really.
One frustration i have with a lot of games is the way collectibles are implemented. Saying "oh, there are 100 coffee thermos to collect" is fine...
however... not providing ANY specific regional information like "3 out of 10 on level 2" is the most frustrating thing ever. Mario World told you where you were missing things and that was in 1990. Are we seriously saying that 20 years on developers haven’t realised this? No. I think its just lazy. Plenty of good games do it and saying "its more of a challenge" is not a good reason. Here is a needle, umma chuck it in that field over there! there are also 99 more needles in 20 other fields. although i am not telling you which fields and how many. Have fun! Oh and its not just thermos flasks you have to collect, oh no! there are Manuscripts (91), TV shows (12), Radio shows (11) Signs (25), Supply Chests (30), Nightmare manuscripts(15) and Can pyramids(12) This makes a total of 298 objects to find. To put this many items in without a way of tracking them is lunacy. to highlight my frustration a little further, I found 99 out of 100 thermos flasks. If i want to find the last one, i will need to play the whole game through again and check every location. grrrr.
To sum it up, it's a good game and i enjoyed it a lot. I will play "the signal" which is a DLC expansion as my buddy Catherine keeps telling me the DLC packs are great.
7/10 (it would have been 8 if there was a collectible tracker)
