4.5/5 ★ – elmodonnell's review of Alan Wake II.

It's remarkable just how consistently Remedy seem to make games that should by all rights be my favorites of all time, but manage to stop just short or overstay their welcome each time. Alan Wake II is by far their most impressive offering to date, and one of the most remarkable new pieces of storytelling I've seen in the gaming medium in years, but the gameplay itself once again holds it back from perfection. Wish I could follow my heart on this one and pelt it with a five-star rating for how much the story stuck with me, but it's still Alan Wake at the end of the day, so of course it's full of aimless meandering and incredibly repetitive combat encounters. To get the obvious out of the way; probably the best-looking game ever made. It happened slowly, but we so steadily crept up to photorealism that even though the live-action sections in this expose the imperfections of the in-game models even more, it still manages to achieve a sort of parity I never thought we'd see in a game. Everything from the opening forest to the back of Alan's shaggy hair is so close to the in-camera counterparts we're repeatedly exposed to, that when we start walking our character in front of projections of live-action footage, it's incredibly close. At least on base PS5 I will say that the lack of any sort of reflections in performance mode was really disappointing, considering this is still probably the worst-performing game I've played on the console next to Jedi Survivor at launch, but there was still no way I was going back to 30fps even for a game so steeped in the 'cinematic' 24fps of film. Lighting, shadows and particles are really impressive considering they had to run with bespoke non-RT systems on consoles, and I was just consistently in awe of how great the game looked, not just in terms of photorealism but just the general art design. The storytelling here is really one of a kind, an almost-satirical meta-narrative deconstruction of horror and detective stories, unabashedly ridiculous but still taking its own world seriously enough to hold up the gravity of the threat. The juxtoposition of its two playable characters is such an inspired move to flesh out and differentiate their approaches to telling a 'story', one being a hack writer who can only crib from plot threads and cliches he plagiarizes, and the other being a methodical, logical problem-solver. They're both great characters and incredible performances both in-game and in live action, but it's their core mechanic that really sets them apart. I will say I was disappointed when I realized how restrictive Alan's writer's room and Saga's mind palace were, not really allowing you to place your own plot threads and clues, but the way the story leverages them later on is incredible. Terrific side characters, and an excellent evolution on all the threads left dangling by the first game. While the enduring novelty of the core mind palace mechanics can't be overstated, unfortunately the rest of the gameplay loop is not quite so novel. Alan's sections fare a little better here, to be fair- it's incredibly cool to re-write a scene and run around the environments affected by Alan's stories, and it goes a long way to distracting from the monotony of the gunplay. There's a good balance of horror between the two stories, but Alan's time in the Dark Place usually lands you in much more tense scenarios, with dozens of potential enemies surrounding you, only able to discern the real from the fake shadows with a flare or some serious trial and error. Sound design is terrific when it comes to the taken in the subway corridors or hotel lobbies, whispering Alan's name and growing more agitated the closer you get or the brighter the light. When it comes to actually fighting them, though... eh? The guns feel better than the first game for sure, but the core flashlight mechanic feels a little bit less punchy. Instead of slowly whittling away an enemy's 'darkness' and focusing the beam at will to fully expose them, you now need to engage in a brief limited-time 'charge' of your light that has a pretty annoying animation/reset. The sound design and visual signposting of the flashlight mechanic a lot weaker now, and enemies can 'regrow' their darkness without there being much signal that your bullets are suddenly doing nothing to them. There's also just not a whole lot of variety to the enemies; there's an incredibly cool body horror monster that appears late in the game and an enemy type in the DLC that gave me an actual out-loud "holy shit" moment, but other than those you'll be stuck with standard taken from the first game; faster ranged throwers, normal grunts, and slightly larger tanks. Just like in the first game, you're usually looking forward to getting back to the story and leaving each combat encounter behind. Credit where it's due, the gameplay design has taken a lot of inspiration from the RE4 remake, and even though it's a pale imitation in practice, it's an incredible step up in basic design literacy from the first game. You at last have consistent inventories between characters, a storage area synched between all save areas, and a pretty much entirely open structure allowing each character to revisit older parts of the map for extras. There's nothing as satisfying as the parry or stun mechanics from RE, but you can at least now give specific body part damage to enemies, and the dodge/melee combo is fun to pull off in the one instance it ever gained me a kill across thirty or so hours. I found the weapon upgrades really compelling in theory, but in practice the upgrade materials were so few and far between (particularly in the late-game) that I felt it could only possibly have been balanced around a NG+/Final Draft playthrough. Loot balancing is certainly better than the first game, I occasionally found myself actually stuck for ammo and didn't have 400 flares stocked up by the end, but the inventory juggling got pretty frustrating by the end- I might've missed a capacity upgrade for Saga, but I spent half the final fight frantically dropping items so I could pick up the ammo drops, because all the weapons I'd collected at that point were pretty essential and the inventory was almost entirely full. As for the DLC, I won't lie I was a little disappointed overall. The Lake House is terrific, and I wish they'd just done two expansions on that level- a two-hour story that you can get through in one sitting, which adds to the main game without feeling like something that was taken away from the final product. It felt like the perfect realization of the Control-Alan Wake universe, balancing the two properties pretty expertly. Night Springs was mostly fine for the novelty, but outside of the Timebreaker episode added absolutely nothing to the story or characters. Jesse's episode was almost entirely pointless and just felt like a cheap asset flip, and while Rose's was certainly funny, it was also entirely made up of pre-existing areas (and their placement in the 'integrated' story felt a little off, Rose's story spoils the mansion area and Breaker's spoils the whole ending). Would've loved for them to do anything even nearly as interesting with the game's mechanics as AW's bonus episodes, play with the changing nature of the world and storytelling rather than just dumping us in existing levels with ridiculously overpowered weaponry and essentially unlimited ammo. They could've done something tonally different and given us a more stealth or horror-focused burst of gameplay, but all three are just embracing the meathead action movie part of the game that the mechanics don't benefit nearly as much. It wouldn't be a Remedy game if gameplay frustrations didn't turn into a massive rant, but need to get across just how much I adore the game regardless. Absolutely loved the ending and twists along the way, won't be doing a Final Draft playthrough any time soon, but I look forward to revisiting this world eventually.