Got this at same time I got Robocop: Rogue City, I liked Robocop better myself. Alan Wake 2 was impressive from a design standpoint, really beautiful detailed environments, and an exceptional graphical achievement. Story was good too. Gameplay though, I felt they pushed too hard on the survival horror aspect. It does this weird thing with item pick-ups where what you find is determined by what you're carrying. Carry too much ammo and health and loot containers will often be empty, or if they do have ammo, it's like 1 bullet or 1 shotgun shell. Whereas if you keep extra inventory in your shoebox, travel lean, item pickups are more frequent and give you more. So, if I have 9 or less extra bullets for my handgun, I'll pick up 10 bullets on my next pickup, if I have 10 or more it's only 5 bullets, and 20 or more I only get one bullet. For shotgun it's 5 or less gets you 6 shotgun shells when picking up an ammo box, more than 6 shells in inventory it's like one or two shells per box after that. I guess they want players to be riding a line just having barley enough to get by, which wasn't always well thought out. This on the fly fight with what you've got would work better if the player didn't have to map their inventory to the D-pad constantly. Once I figured this inventoey-loot situation out though the rest became a breeze, I just knew when I should be stocking up supplies at the shoe box and when I should be looting containers or avoid looting containers until I dropped off excess supplies that made it easier. Batteries were also horrible to come by, but I figured out a trick that whenever I reloaded a checkpoint, battery power would be at full. So when I had a checkpoint or save point, I'd reload, just to keep myself from having to use a battery to recharge the flashlight. I found work-arounds to this game's annoying quirks, got by fine, I don't think people should have to struggle so hard to enjoy a game like this.
Plot-wise though, I loved this idea they want to bridge Remedy's various game universes. Curious if Rockstar will let them make those Alan Wake / Control / Quantum Break connections with Max Payne when Remedy remakes those for Rockstar, or if they loosely and spiritually connect them like with in the Alan Wake / Control universe with characters like Tim Breaker or Alex Casey being sort of proxies to parallel worlds.
Gameplay though it's very different to the original. Combat in original Alan Wake felt more casual but was still lots of fun, more forgiving availability of ammo and supplies like batteries and healing wasn't even an issue, plenty of flares and flare gun ammo and flash grenades and loads more bad guys. Here it felt like they wanted combat to feel somewhat Souls'y. The Dark Place being mostly shadows that melt when you shine light on them with the occasional tougher enemy was weird, not sure I care for that design aspect. I think they should have stuck with what they did for original games, just improve on it a lot, it could have been an action spectacle.
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