vitalyx

Alan Wake 2 is a well executed title. The game launches and loads fast, looks and runs great. But I didn't find the story or gameplay engaging. At least Control (their other game) had an amazing gameplay and its also boring story wasn't in the way of gameplay the way it is in AW2.

More of the same in a good and bad way. Great gameplay and fairly interesting world (though not their best). Poor ass graphics for 2022, saved to an extent by artistic direction. Too spread out. I got bored and stopped playing. Bloodborne was better. All subjective, of course. No need to get pissed if you disagree.

I hate this game, I really do. It’s not one of those games that **** but you just shrug and move on, even if you lost a bit of money on them. No, this game deserves a review. Or rather a warning. If you cut yourself, you might enjoy this game too. But if you are a normal person, please stay way. This game is not a challenge, it’s a punishment. Technically and artistically this game is awesome, but the core design choices, like the absolutely unforgiving nature of it, the lack of proper saves, the necessity to retrace an enormous amount of a level every time you die, the “adaptive” difficulty level where if you die the game becomes harder (you got that right) by giving you only half your health until you defeat an enormously difficult boss, that is, if you even manage to get to it through all the other NPCs, now that you health is halved. And if you keep losing, you’ll find yourself running out of items and having weapons in need of repair, which is only fixable by farming the easier to kill NPCs, until you collect enough souls. You can even die in a safe heaven in this game and lose all your souls… If you still want to get this game, don’t buy a digital download, get a disk version, at least you can resell it later.

I really had high hopes but was left sorely disappointed with: - Graphics. It looks dated. The character and monster models were much better in the games released a few years prior, same goes for the quality of the invironments. - Character animation. Pretty much any tripple A game has a better one. - Story and voice acting make me cringe. Just look at Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us 2, and many others for comparison. This was enough to break all immersion for me. I would keep playing if I found the gameplay enjoyable but I found controls to be unintuitive and convoluted. Usually, when a game has a high metacritic user score I tend to find it enjoyable. Not with this one. In fact, I'm puzzled as to why it has such a high user score. I'm glad I got it on sale.

The best FPS game I've played in years, so much joy! If you like fast paced competitive shooters this is as hardcore as it gets. Even though it's easy to start playing, the skill ceiling is very high. Reaching milestones on your way to a virtuoso player (like landing rockets mid-air with trajectory predicting shots or hitting enemies with flickshots from railgun) is a very rewarding experience. This game looks and sounds amazing. The level design is fantastic, the artists created mesmerizing bizarre looking worlds with so much attention to detail. The character and weapons models are equally good. Weapons sound very satisfying, and so does the announcer's voice. The game is well optimized. On RTX 2070 on Ultra settings with 70% of 4K resolution (slightly higher than 1440p) I get around 90 to 120 FPS and have no problem maintaining 144 FPS on my other full hd monitor in all situations. Some people have been complaining about balance and technical issues. Many of those complaints were deserved and have been addressed since 2017 when the game was released. Some still don't like the idea of champions, but if champions were truly unbalanced, people would gravitate towards certain champions or use the single best champion, but that's not happening. Even active abilities of the champions can be disabled, if you don't like them. I find that some members of the community are overly and bitterly critical. Don't let that deter you from trying out this awesome game. It's free, beginner friendly and lots of fun.

I'm making another review of Alan Wake, since I was able to tweak the settings and get half-decent performance at 1360x768 resolution. The game uses an original way to tell a story. The way the story is told is great - episodic format, TV and radio show sequences, manuscript fragments you find. All very original. The story itself is not bad too. There are bad things, like facial animations and lipsyncing, even in prerendered cut scenes and low level of detail in models and textures. There are good things like lighting effects on sparks when you shoot the "taken", their smoky shadows, disturbance effects just before the "taken" appear and volumetric light effects - all look amazing. Ultimately, though, the gameplay gradually becomes more and more boring. It's original in a way, because you have to use the flashlight on the "taken" before you are able to shoot them. But it's not that engaging to keep doing this over and over again for the length of the game. For me, the story wasn't interesting enough to endure the frustrating gameplay. For example Dreamfall had gameplay issues too, but it had a very compelling story that kept me playing even through the tedious parts till the very end of the game. With Alan Wake I gave up in the middle of the forth chapter. So, to wrap it up, the game is not that bad to stop playing after 30 minutes, but at the same time not that great to finish it and say "that was a wonderful experience". P.S. It looks like Metacritic is full of fanboys and any rating in the yellow or red automatically receives mostly downvotes. We are all sharing personal opinions here. Sorry, I didn't like your favorite game as much as you did.