REVIEW: Alan Wake - American Nightmare

Alan’s back … but can he a-Wake from this American Nightmare?

Readers of this blog will understand I have a lot of time for Alan Wake, a flawed yet engrossing game with an existential crisis of a storyline that will make your brain bleed in its over the top complexity. American Nightmare tries it’s best to sum up what has happened, so that it may be possible for gamers who haven’t played previous Wake titles to drop in. However, it just becomes a stark reminder of how convoluted the whole story was anyway. The matter of fact is that I like waving my torch around and shooting things in the dark. Well, there’s a whole lot of that in this stand-alone title.

Microsoft Studios have tried to up the ante a bit by making this title more action based and less ‘survival’ than its predecessors. Wake has a whole host of weaponry and ammo and batteries are plentiful, making you a lot less aware of saving supplies and concentrating more on the killing. Where it would have been an option to flee at some point in Alan Wake, this American Nightmare chapter makes it obvious they want you to go in guns blazing – and I’m happy to oblige.

Alongside this there are new monsters, characters and a bit more about Mr. Scratch meaning the story has clearly progressed since Wake disappeared. What seems to have happened is he is caught in a time loop which is a good and a bad thing. It's good because I like Groundhog Day, but it does mean you sometimes watch cut sequences three to four times, that you get used to the locations and find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly. The storywriters try to manage it so it speeds up each time, but essentially when you find yourself repeating what you’ve already done twice, on purpose, it becomes annoying. Another factor is I didn’t get close to dying once, I whizzed through the entire game in about 4 hours (which is quite healthy for a downloadable game), but overall I enjoyed this a lot.

The action has picked up a bit, and whether this will translate into Alan Wake 2 remains to be seen, but it’s a nice stepping stone to get there and even though the story is as ridiculous as ever, it’s still an enjoyable experience. The repetition really did let it down, whether it mattered to the story or not, perhaps some liked this? But for me, it was slightly lazy.

Rating: 6/10

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare DLC

Red Dead becomes Undead in this new DLC that successfully combines the Western genre with Horror so that shooting zombies never looked so cool

Rockstar have graced us with an odd add-on that takes the original game and completely changes it by adding zombies into the Wild West without taking itself too seriously. You start as John Marston again on his farm as his dead Uncle attacks his family and turns them into zombies. After tying them up, he vows to find a solution to help them and so the action begins.

Rockstar have taken advantage of the current Grindhouse trend and given this a B-movie cult horror genre feel by exploiting it in all the right places and being completely self-aware. The zombies move realistically and can only really be put down with a shot to the head and when you do shoot, instead of a typical gaming 'blow-up' head shot, instead only that part of the head is blown away giving the game a physicality not often achieved, especially with such fodder as Dead Rising 2. As you save town after town trying to uncover the truth, you bump into the characters from the original story making it a bit of a nostalgic trip as well. Similar to the original game, you have to help strangers along the way, find missing people and other small missions but essentially you're trying to find out what's behind all this.

As fun as it was to play, saving town after town by giving survivors ammunition (something that is scarce at first but builds up rather quickly) becomes a bit of a ball-ache. You have to go up to one survivor and then head to the others giving them ammo before finishing off the zombies. Trying to negotiate a way to get up to these survivors can be taxing to say the least, especially with zombies biting at your tails. However, once you've saved all the towns and done the main storyline (with a great 'few months later' epilogue) I'd imagine unless you're a completist you'd probably leave it there.

They also cleverly use the zombie factor as an excuse to include zombie animals as well as special 'Apocalypse' horses that if you catch, give you a certain special power. Though my Pestilence horse which was supposed to be impossible to kill, died almost as soon as I got it by falling off a cliff but yet I survived, so that was a bit of an anti-climax. However, there are Sasquatches, unicorns and more to find should you wish to do so. But as fun as it was, saving the towns occupied a lot of my time and soon became annoying. Also the final onslaught in a cave wasn't the big finale I expected it to be, instead it fell quite flat. It's also worth noting that you can still use your Red Eye slowing down time meaning you shouldn't really become too overwhelmed with zombies at any one time. The good thing is there is more than one type of undead, you have the normal ones, you have little fast spider like ones, spitting ones and big boulder-like ones. Therefore, it can keep the killing fresh by mixing it up with an assortment of the four. Weapons are also customised for zombie killing including a gun that shoots dead flesh back at them.

The game still sticks to it's open world sandbox roots, with certain Ranked missions, Treasure hunting and outfit collecting so there is something for everyone here. I couldn't justify spending enough time on it to complete it 100%, but doing the main storyline with bits afterward took about 8 hours, perhaps a bit more, and that's saving all the towns as well.


For a downloadable pack, this is great but I still felt they should have eased off saving all the towns constantly and concentrated more on doing missions. It's a nice, strange 'ending' as such with Red Dead Redemption and a great alternative to the Western feel of the original game. It's unique, brave and has successfully won over a lot of the audience, it's also due to come out on disc form in the near future as well. Rockstar have also announced that a Red Dead bundle will come out at the end of November with this and all the other DLC available in one big package. I recommend you buy this, especially if you loved Red Dead Redemption and it's a great DLC but again it's not perfect. Great idea, great gameplay, but felt like there could have been more to the story and saving all the towns became more of a chore as it went along. I'd love to see a DLC to this DLC (if that makes sense) which just opened it out a bit more, but for such content, depth and originality, it's one of the best DLC's out there. Go forth and enjoy - dead or undead.

DLC Rating: 9/10

Alan Wake: The Writer DLC

After The Signal, Alan Wake returns in The Writer in it's final downloadable content package to clear some stuff up ... or if anything to make it all less confusing.

I don't know what it is with Alan Wake, but when I saw The Writer had been released I got really excited. Seeing as I thought the main game was average, these new chapters seem to appeal to me more and I don't know why. Instead of doing the same thing again and again one after the other, after a break the return to the gameplay and story feels like a strange 'coming home' of sorts. Except this is one strange home.

Alan is progressing through his memories more and we see the blurred line between the conscious and the subconscious. Forums are going wild for what this all means, who Mr. Scratch is and trying to assemble a linear narrative for it all but essentially they're missing out on something painfully obvious in this metaphysical nightmare. It's completely self-aware. It knows that the player is engrossing himself in this world and yet forgetting that essentially, none of this exists, that perhaps YOU are Mr. Scratch, playing with this character, controlling him. You think you're Alan, even though you're obviously not Alan - something the story keeps telling you. It's a smart, clever, post-post-modern way of looking at gaming that is different from films or a book. Films, books, TV programmes are PASSIVE, what Alan Wake draws attention to is the fact that you are the protagonist, that it is YOU deciding what happens, how far you want to take this etc. that you are interacting with this and as much as your character isn't Alan Wake, neither are you.

It's this jumbled up complexities that has put off a lot of reviewers, but what they don't understand is that this is quite a bold, enjoyable gameplay experience. In fact, this DLC chapter is one of my favourite chapters of the whole Alan Wake saga, perhaps my most favourite, because we are completely in the darkness. This is a horrible, strange nightmare where his dark memories are brought up, where the cabins turn around and around, where his house becomes some weird folding Inception style maze, where boats float through the sky and all the while making it fun to play. You can read so much into this if you want to that it could drive you mad, or you could just simply choose to play the game and still enjoy it. Luckily, it caters for both. It might be about an hour or two long, but it's enough to keep those fellow Wakers happy.

Story wise, Alan is just trying to get out of this nightmare with Thomas lending a hand, but at the same time confusing things further. The story is brought to a conclusion somewhat but essentially setting it up for a sequel, one which looks like he must try and write himself back to reality. It's an interesting concept of what is real, what isn't real and the idea of existing. Why are we watching someone trying to create a story where he can get back to the real world, when this isn't the real world anyway? Alan Wake is clearly a troubled man and I'm actually looking forward to seeing where it goes, I'm just not hoping for much of a conclusion.

DLC Rating: 8/10