Been playing through some of my steam back catalog

Alan Wake

I'd heard this game had "good story and atmosphere" but didn't know much else about it. The

beginning of the game was interesting and initially had my attention, but it didn't take long

for the game to show it's flaws, of which there were many. The combat is abundant yet terrible,

consisting of a gimmick where enemies are invincible until you "shoot" them with one gun to

remove their "shield" and then they can be shot like any other game.

It's about as linear as linear gets, and while the atmosphere is interesting at first the overused effects that appear again and again with the same enemies over and over rapidly make the game wear out it's welcome. This wouldn't be so bad if the story was good, but Spoiler The "Night Springs" episodes were hands down the best part of the game and I was happy every time I found one.

Certain elements in the game are extremely grating as well. Every time an enemy spawns, EVERY TIME, the game hijacks your camera to go look at them before giving you control back. It's not only irritating but destroys the atmosphere even further. Why the hell can't stuff just be allowed to sneak up on you? The "combat music" makes this even worse. The game feels very "sectioned" in the way people bash generic console game design: I think Alan Wake embodies a lot of the worst of it.

I think the second cable car ride early on in the game sums it up nicely. You've already been

on one cable car ride that "crashed" and you had to fight your way out, and when you get to the

second one Alan even says "Not another one" or something to that extent. You hop on it, and of

course towards the end the same thing happens yet again. There's no tension or atmosphere when

the combat areas are so frequent that you expect them to happen. The game would have been

much better off with much more suspenseful areas where you expected things to happen and they

didn't, or you caught glimpses of things that you later couldn't find. Instead it just became

extremely monotonous.

If you haven't guessed already, I really didn't like it and felt like I was forcing myself to finish it just to see if the story suddenly got better, which it didn't. Very disappointed, I'd give it a 2/5 and only because of the Night Springs episodes.

Alan Wake's American Nightmare

I had gotten both together in a steam sale for super cheap, and after my experience with the main game I wasn't planning to try this but I was kind of glad I did. I found the atmosphere much more compelling because of the Night springs theme, Spoiler

Ultimately the postitive/negative elements of this balanced out for me and I'd give it a 3/5.

Alice: Madness Returns

The consolization is definitely a bit of a nightmare in this game, and I had to do quite a lot of config file editing in order to minimize negative mouse acceleration and deadzone, neither of which can be entirely eliminated. Definitely irritating and a bit of a headache but that being said...

Holy fuck this game was amazing. Alice is losing her fucking mind and Wonderland is going with it, and the combination of the two makes for some amazing environments and a fantastically dark story. The mouse control issues aside, the platforming is tight and responsive and the weapons are fun to use. The writing is incredibly tight and clever, and voice actors fit their roles absolutely perfectly. It's definitely quite a long game, but the varied environments coupled with Alice and Cheshire's witty banter will keep you going.

I'd write more about how good this game is but I'd just spoil everything. The consolization issues are the only downside I had with this game, and given it's a platformer some may prefer to use a gamepad. As it stands, it's a high 4/5, and I'd give it a perfect score if it had perfect controls.

The Secret World

Started playing this a couple of weeks ago, and I'm currently towards the end of Egypt. This game is a huge bag of mixed feelings, but there's definitely more good than bad. As is widely touted, the questing is unorthodox, the combat is very "meh," and the atmosphere is amazing. Hands down the best atmosphere of any MMO I've played out there, and my god the writing. Holy shit the writing. This game writes circles around every other goddamn MMO in existence. On top of that, all main and story quest lines are thoroughly voice acted and the story is actually interesting.

The biggest downside come from the flip side of having more complicated questing. Some quests involve huge amounts of research/investigation and can take a damn long time to complete. When these are well done they're absolutely fantastic, but when they're not it can get rather ugly. Due to the nature of the game you want to avoid looking up solutions as much as possible, but some are simply insanely counter-intuitive or require ridiculous amounts of trial and error. The worst is when you've got a quest that you've figured out most of the steps so far on your own, and get stuck on one of the last steps. You don't want to look it up because you got so far without doing so, so you spend an hour checking/investigating everything you can think of. Finally you give up and look it up. Either it's something painfully obvious and you're kicking yourself hard, or it's something retardedly counterintuitive or poorly designed and you wind up screaming obscenities at the monitor, cursing the design team and ragequitting the game for the time being.

On top of that the game is absolutely not as polished/bugfree as you'd expect for a 3 year old game so heavily focused on questing. When you spend a couple hours working on a quest only to give up and google it to find it is indeed bugged, the rage potential goes through the roof.

There's some things that this game has done that are incredibly clever, i.e. the inventory system, and despite the combat being lacklustre the skill wheel has quite a bit of depth to it. The fact it's set in the modern day also affords it huge vasts of material relatively untapped in the MMO world, and it really shines in taking advantage of it (i.e. your character has a cellphone, and you can use it to turn in quests etc). The terrain/world design, especially in Egypt, is also fantastic and makes much better use of the Z axis than most games do. The world actually feels like it has depth.

Overall I'd give it a low 4/5 for when those quests go sour, but I really have to emphasize on how incredibly good the writing and presentation is in this game. Should also probably mention I'm playing as Illuminati, which supposedly also has the best mission handler texts.