3/5 ★ – aarbypls's review of Alan Wake II.

I truly cannot remember the last time I've been this disappointed in a game. Alan Wake 2 is a game that hints at interesting ideas, and even uses the aesthetic of interesting ideas, but never actually does anything interesting itself. The gameplay itself is very weak, not even close to the gameplay of any of the recent Resident Evil games, but I was willing to forgive all that due to the promise of weird, Twin Peaks-inspired storytelling. Unfortunately there's not actually that much weird shit in this game, and the stuff that is there seems more like one of the many Twin Peaks knockoff TV shows that got cancelled after one season than anything actually well done or interesting. The gameplay is pretty one-note. No new enemies are introduced after a little bit of time spent with both characters, and the Taken, already a boring concept by the end of the original Alan Wake, come off as extremely cliche and rote. The wolves are genuinely thrilling to fight, but you fight like 4 of them in the game and they really can't carry this whole combat system. And you know what? It would be really easy to forgive that if the game was doing anything else, but it isn't. It's really hard to express just how few novel moments there are in this thing outside of the first 3-4 hours or so. Alan Wake's whole mechanic, of switching out story beats in order to rearrange the environment around him, *literally* does almost nothing apart from changing the environment of a room or two at a time. You'll make a hotel lobby change from the crime scene of a murder cult to a site of demonic possession and *nothing will change* apart from the environmental design. It's absurd! The whole mechanic means that you simply *explore areas where interesting things have already happened*. I'm sorry but it's like I'm taking fucking crazy pills! The payoff of the hotel sequence just mentioned is a 15 second long sequence where you run away from "the dark presence". Jesus! This isn't even touching on the worst part of the game - the horrible, repetitive, lazy jump scares. Imagine if the homeless guy behind Winkie's in Mulholland Drive popped out like 10 times in a row. There's a sequence where you, playing as Saga Anderson, need to go into a basement, turn on the power, and then go to the top floor of a building to open a door. This sequence contains no less than 6 jump scares, all the same image lazily superimposed over the action of the game with an extremely loud sound suddenly playing. That whole area, about 30 minutes of gameplay, probably contains about 20 instances of the same jump scare. It fucking sucks so much dude! I don't know man. I can rant about this for days. The game is not good. The music is nice though. The game is real pretty. The acting and voice acting is solid. But man. What a missed opportunity.