TheChickenKing
Savant
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2016
- Messages
- 296
I agree with that. I loved the game for the characters, atmosphere, and writing, but "I loved" doesn't translate to it being the best game ever. It's more of a really fun, campy B-movie or TV show, that'll hopefully get a follow-up some day. Gameinformer just posted an interview with Sam Lake, who noted that the initial attempt at creating an open world game left them with a ton of large spaces and things like a proper "position of the sun/moon" lighting system, which both means that the world feels very real and properly sized but also that gameplay spaces tend towards being just a bit too long. If you get into it, I thought the DLCs were well-made and imaginative, too.
For my two cents, I'd recommend cranking up the difficulty as much as possible to make the enemies more dangerous. There are several encounters you won't have enough ammo to clear on the harder settings, forcing you to ration everything and run away when possible. I thought this helped with both encounter variety and the atmosphere, since you're not just blasting everything in sight to bits every single time.
I'd also say that I thought Alan Wake's American Nightmare was worth playing, but it's an objectively worse game and absolutely only something to run through if you liked the original. More repetitive, heavily focused on action over atmosphere, and made on a much smaller budget. It was originally released as a 15 dollar game, not a full-priced title, and that explains a lot. Still, there's some cool fights, greater enemy and weapon variety than the original game so the combat-focused structure doesn't grate too badly, and I thought Mr. Scratch was a fun villain that plays well into the schlocky nonsense I love in Remedy's stuff. The FMV bits were great.
Gameinformer's article, if anyone is interested.
For my two cents, I'd recommend cranking up the difficulty as much as possible to make the enemies more dangerous. There are several encounters you won't have enough ammo to clear on the harder settings, forcing you to ration everything and run away when possible. I thought this helped with both encounter variety and the atmosphere, since you're not just blasting everything in sight to bits every single time.
I'd also say that I thought Alan Wake's American Nightmare was worth playing, but it's an objectively worse game and absolutely only something to run through if you liked the original. More repetitive, heavily focused on action over atmosphere, and made on a much smaller budget. It was originally released as a 15 dollar game, not a full-priced title, and that explains a lot. Still, there's some cool fights, greater enemy and weapon variety than the original game so the combat-focused structure doesn't grate too badly, and I thought Mr. Scratch was a fun villain that plays well into the schlocky nonsense I love in Remedy's stuff. The FMV bits were great.
Gameinformer's article, if anyone is interested.