Wow, I'm surprised at how good this looks, to be honest. Now I have to decide if I should pick up this or Lost Planet 2. It'll probably be this, because I don't really have a lot of scary games in my library.
Review: Alan Wake
- Thread starter Susan Arendt
- Start date
As I mentioned previously, the spoilers are not story related and are very, very minor - you'll see the names of Episodes, for example. I prefer to overwarn than underwarn, however.The Random One said:
From what I've seen so far, to be honest, Alan Wake looks like an underdeveloped, undersized (7-8 hours and no multiplayer? please... what's with this silly trend of providing less and less content for our 60 dollars?), repeatitive, sub-hd attempt at an interactive B-movie with a sub-par story and characters that share the same personality as a cactus.
They cut it down to the bone, and as a result there isn't enough meat left to justify a purchase.
No reason to spend money on it when there are games out there with better stories, much better characters, a truckload more content (for the same price) and better action. Yakuza 3 is an example, but there are plenty more.
They cut it down to the bone, and as a result there isn't enough meat left to justify a purchase.
No reason to spend money on it when there are games out there with better stories, much better characters, a truckload more content (for the same price) and better action. Yakuza 3 is an example, but there are plenty more.
Yeah, its just that I only have enough money for one game. So I cant decide between a good story but not extremly much replay value, or a fun game that you can infinitely mess around on.Susan Arendt said:
But thanks for the review anyway. The Escapist is one of the more trustworthy sites for games.
Might want to read the whole sentence: "7-8 hours and no multiplayer" = very little content for the price of a full game. At the very least multiplayer options help adding some value when the single player is short.masakoz said:
For sure I don't want or need multiplayer with every game, but this trend of providing very little content in games is getting tiresome. I don't mean that every game needs 60-70 hours worth of content like Yakuza 3, but at the very least 15-20 should be the norm, and much less than that should definitely be frowned upon.
All this time in development to deliver less than 10 hours of gameplay is simply a new definition of lazy.
Depends. If the core gameplay is satisfying enough, it'd be worth replaying on the hardest setting(which should also unlock more tidbits and exposition about the story IIRC)Abriael said:
Harder difficulty (which is just some changed statistics), collectibles and things that can be accessed only during the second playthrough can't be considered a viable replacement for actual content.Zombie Nixon said:
Quite the contrary, they're gimmicks developers use in order to artificially increase the gameplay without having to add any real content. In other words a the easy way out for lazy bums that can't manage to make a game that offers a decent amount of content for it's price.
"satisfying core gameplay" isn't antithetical to content. There are plenty games out there with satisfying core gameplay that encourage multiple playthroughs and that last much more than Alan Wake for each single playthrough, so this simply isn't an excuse.
Delivering less than 10 hours worth of actual content after 5 years in development is simply ridiculous, to be honest. Giving it a full score is the perfect way to encourage lazy developers to cut their games to the bare bones in order to save development money and resources and still sell them for the same price, or even worse, shift content away from the actual game in order to juice us further with DLC epiosodes (like Remedy seems to be doing).
For me it just makes me angry. There is no way I would buy a 360 for any one game particularly at this stage in it's 'life'. I can only hope they put this out on the PC. Given the way it was developed turning their backs on PC gamers is infuriating.Yossarian1507 said:
I guess it depends on how much you enjoy each hour of play. While I sunk many hours into WoW many of those hours kinda sucked. If something is very good I am willing to splash out on it a bit more. Like a nice meal now and then. That was my attitude with Monkey Island 5. Sure it was not as long as many games but I enjoyed some of the moments more.Tdc2182 said:
I don't see any reference to the game's length in the review. I've heard people say the game clocks in at around twelve hours, which is at least decent. And the free DLC should add an hour or two on top of that(I'm not a fan of DLC, but if you spend $60 on Alan Wake you are getting it). Also, I'm pretty sure the developers restarted on Alan Wake from scratch in 2007, so the game's really only been in the works for three years, tops.Abriael said:
I completely agree with you in principle, I'm just not sure if awake qualifies as an example yet. But I'll probably buy it and find out.
It sounds top, and more than a little like the 360's timely answer to Heavy Rain. Let's hope it's similarly successful, and leads to the games industry giving a little bit more of a shit about storytelling. I'll be buying it as soon as I have the dough.
