The darkness still haunts Alan Wake.
Remedy says they want to challenge the convention of XBLA
games with Alan Wake's American Nightmare, a new downloadable Xbox 360 pulp action adventure with a touch of grindhouse sensibility. This doesn't mean that Alan Wake has been vastly
changed from its debut; it's very much the same style, with just a touch more
grime, screen flicker and different narrative trappings.
At some point, a young writer named Alan Wake penned a few
episodes of a TV show called Night
Springs; if you missed the original game, it's an homage to The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits TV shows. This
adventure takes you through one of the episodes Alan Wake wrote, and the words
he penned are alive and well in an Arizona town called... Night Springs.
As part of the TV show trappings that surround Alan Wake's American Nightmare, we lose
the character Alan Wake as narrator and we're treated to a dramatically-pausing
Rod Serling-esque guide that explains Wake's adventure.
"You're not my shadow! Begone, sir!"
In this new tale, Wake is chasing his dark alter ego and
serial killer, Mr. Scratch, through a Rt. 66-inspired Arizona town. That means
vistas, amazing sunsets and plenty of neon to cast back the shadows as Wake
recovers pages from the TV show manuscript to piece together the mystery and
find how to stop Mr. Scratch.
Like in the original title, the pages Wake finds are very
much alive and world-altering. In one sequence at an oil derrick, Wake needed
to recreate the conditions that existed on the page before he could cause a
satellite to crash and explode. He read the page and noted that music was
playing and that the oil was flowing at the well; once Wake turned on a nearby
radio and turned a wheel on the derrick, the conditions were met and the
satellite came beaming out of the sky.
I was told the game would be about two-thirds action and
one-third story, and the sections of the game I saw definitely check out against
Remedy's formula; Wake wields a nail gun and unloads serious firepower with
handguns, shotguns and automatic weapons against his foes. The gameplay hasn't
been dramatically changed from the first game, as you'll still need to use your
flashlight to break the shadows on enemies before you can take them out with a
well-placed shot.
New enemies have been added this time around, like some nasty
large guys that have the ability to split into multiple normal-sized bad guys.
It adds an unpredictability to combat that makes Alan Wake's foes just that much scarier and deadlier.
Stealing Alan Wake's handsaw was his first and last mistake.
After the narrative portion of the demo, I was given free
rein over the "Horde" Arcade Mode section of the game, which pits Wake against
waves of enemies in a fight for survival until the sun rises. It's quite tense
and makes you use all your abilities and senses as you dodge and weave from
enemy attacks, drop flares and fire off rounds of ammunition and nails. I quite
enjoyed the tenseness of it all, and while some people might complain that it's
only a single-player mode, that made it far more challenging than if you could
take one or more buddies in with you. Alan Wake fights alone and Barry Wheeler
would never make a good co-op buddy.
I was told the game will take about five hours to beat for
the average player and that the date and price haven't been set just yet. Look for it to arrive sometime
in mid-Q1 with a solid price point. The game is shaping up quite nicely and it
looks, plays and sounds pretty amazing.
