Alan Wake 2 (XSX|S/PS5/Epic Games Store). Digital only. Gamespot 10.

Shutter's fill wrote:Picked this up on the Iceland Store for £28 (including international payment fees which totalled 95p).

Doubt I can go wrong for that price. No VPN required.

Captain Kinopio wrote:Right, finished. I think, I dunno and to be honest I’m not sure I care. I’m so annoyed at this game, it’s so unbelievably frustrating. I want to give it a complete pasting but I can’t because honestly it’s quite good. Having said that I can definitely understand the 4/5/6 out of 10s more than the 10s.

The good is really bloody good, the world, the music, the environments, how ambitious it is, the mix of live action and gameplay. It does some really cool stuff and the musical moment is genuinely brilliant. It’s a great horror game with some truly chilling moments, the Alan Wake death screen, the drowned woman plot line and Alice Wake killing herself. All really dark and moody and properly scary stuff.

The bad though is just interwoven through the whole game and every single strawberry floating moment I was willing it to be better. The main culprit is undoubtedly the combat. I will not hear out any apologists for it, you may get more used to it on subsequent playthroughs but it is just entirely dysfunctional. From the unclear enemy forms to the light mechanic, to the whole strawberry floating point of it. You quickly learn there is absolutely no point in engaging with combat encounters unless the game forces your hand. There’s no reward for killing enemies and the frustration just interrupts the flow of exploring. It’s properly crap.

Speaking of the game interrupting itself, my god does this game begrudge you playing it. Slapping things up on a wall, watching cutscenes, looking at tv ads, doing profiles of characters, NPCs rambling on about crap. It’s almost like the game knows it’s core mechanics are just flat out not good enough so it tries to distract you from engaging with them for more than 10 minutes at a time. Control may have had more waffle in it than this but it was much more easily ignored.

The game looks nice, not jaw dropping (at least not on PS5) but what the gooseberry fool is up with the lighting. It’s so strawberry floating janky. It’s like the game always wants you to have the torch on so even when it’s the middle of the day, the second your out of direct sunlight everything goes a weird shady orange and you can’t see gooseberry fool. It’s such a weird look, Anne it’s supposed to be part of the atmosphere but it pissed me off more than anything else.

Finally the story, it’s just whatever. Remedy sure can build a world but the most off putting thing here is that Sam Lake clearly strawberry floating loves this gooseberry fool to death and he’s just spinning round circles loving the world he’s created and himself in it and you’re just watching thinking ‘can we get to the strawberry floating point please’. Control is pretty meandering but you have such a clearer focus on the moment to moment structure. I’m watching the second bought of end credits now and I don’t know if it’s the end of the game or a fake out and I’m really half way through as honestly nothing really seems to have been resolved and I don’t really understand the point of anything I’ve done.


Needless to say it’s been a very disappointing experience. I’m on the hook now for all the DLC and I guess I’ll go through it but boy this really could have been a worldy if it had better game direction. Instead it’s just a colossal missed opportunity with some great moments and maybe one of the best game soundtracks ever.

8

Skarjo wrote:The story is so bonkers that it made me retroactively misunderstand what happened in the first one.

Frank wrote:The latest update let's you tone down the awful screamer jump scares Amazing. Easily the worst part of the game. It's just so lazy. "We're making a horror now so- WAAAAHHHH"

Photek wrote:

Frank wrote:The latest update let's you tone down the awful screamer jump scares Amazing. Easily the worst part of the game. It's just so lazy. "We're making a horror now so- WAAAAHHHH"

Can I turn them off because holy f**k they scared the bejesus out of me, creeping about headphones cranked and BLAM!

Frank wrote:

Photek wrote:

Frank wrote:The latest update let's you tone down the awful screamer jump scares Amazing. Easily the worst part of the game. It's just so lazy. "We're making a horror now so- WAAAAHHHH"

Can I turn them off because holy f**k they scared the bejesus out of me, creeping about headphones cranked and BLAM!

I think it's just an option to turn the "intensity" to "low" rather than turning them off entirely, which is a shame. It's a step in the right direction, at least Pretty sure I had one the other day where even Saga just went "strawberry float's sake" after it. Even she's had enough of them.

bit of an in-universe question, why would the Old Gods of Asgard have Herald of Darkness on their "best of" if the whole song only exists in Alan's head/"the Dark Place"?. If anything, you'd think it'd be a version without the interview bits.

There's apparently more Old Gods news coming up on Friday too. Would love a tour, just to hear them playing some of those tunes live. I'm expecting it to just be "we've got another song in the Alan Wake 2 DLC lol"

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:Jesus this latest patch has made the game virtually unplayable. Nearly every menu / zoomed view scene is impossible to back out of. How does gooseberry fool like this pass QA? It does it like 75% of the time.

Fixed cases where players couldn’t exit interactable notes and containers (e.g. Nursery Rhymes or the Shotgun Puzzle in the Covenience Store).