It's fine, it does nothing to revolutionize the series, but improves and adds a couple of things, which I appreciate. My favourite change being the sped up gameplay in general. Movement is more fluid, they ditched the looting animations, and takedowns are a lot faster to execute. I also liked the addition of guns and fangs for hire, bringing a new dynamic into the known gameplay loop (It's not completely new to the series, but drastically expanded upon). The core gameplay is solid, with the focus on liberating outposts. The only criticism I have is the subpar hit feedback. It's alright during stealth, when using silenced weapons and a bow, but during firefights, the feedback of bullet impact kinda gets lost, and it feels like I'm shooting sacks of flour, which is admittedly a criticism I have since Far Cry 3. Fortunately, there is almost always the option to play stealthily, so it didn't bother me too much. What did bother me, though, was the sometimes terrible mission design during the story sequences, the peak of which being the last boss fight of the game.
Speaking of which, what a terrible ending. I don't dislike what they did, but how they did it. This needed more build up, it came way too sudden, and that whole ending sequence lasted maybe 3 minutes. The general premise, though, I liked. I have nothing against Montana and although It's not as exotic as Far Cry 3 and 4 it has its own distinct vibe, with the cult roaming the land. I just wished they would have leaned more into the disturbing part of it. I'm still remembering those eerie teaser trailers they put out before release. I don't think they quite nailed that atmosphere in the final game. What I did not expect is the amount of work they would put into the music side of things. Every region having their own interpretation of songs written for the cult, from way to catchy country songs to ambient dreamy tracks, that make one of the areas in the game almost a feverish dream at times. The music is probably the highlight of the game for me. The rest is an okay game, which could get stale, but is thankfully one of Ubisoft's series with comparatively short playtimes.

Left me pretty underwhelmed. After the first hours I was quite positive, I liked the desert setting, how the mystery gets established, and the exploration up until that point, the highlight being the fortress, in which the player is stuck in for a while. That place captured what made the first Amnesia great I think, a single vast location you have to make sense of, with a hostile presence lurking in the dark, keeping you on edge and a great sense of progression in exploring every nook and cranny. It also incorporates the strengths of past Frictional games, most important their unique physics based interaction with the environment and puzzles that make use of that.
After the fortress, though, the game kinda starts to stumble for me. The story gets convoluted and unfocused, which is not helped by the more and more disjointed levels/locations the player traverses through. The sense of exploration I got in the fortress section got lost on me, as well as the story, so the latter half felt more and more like a slog to play through. It also didn't help that the presence of monsters became too dominant, so they became less and less frightening and more of an annoyance.
The unique death mechanic, the game has, also allowed me to skip multiple sections of the game, which made a few challenging situations pointless and rather random. The goal of that and the more disjointed locations were probably to make the player feel lost and losing control, but that didn't really work for me, unfortunately, I just wasn't as immersed as I was in past Frictional titles.

This small budgeted little standalone addition to the original Alan Wake fixes the predecessor's biggest problem, actually being fun to play. With the addition of new enemy types, a lot more weapons and improvements in the responsiveness to Alan's movement, I actually thought the combat system was quite enjoyable. In addition to that, this game with its own little self-contained story being set inside the fictional show Night Springs isn't nearly as long as the original Alan Wake game, which means the gameplay doesn't overstay it's welcome this time. The story told was alright elevated by the antagonist Mr. Scratch, which results in a more cheesy tone compared to Alan Wake, but this fitted the narrative context well. The most interesting part for me were the manuscript pages giving us more details about characters from Alan Wake and what happened to them after the events in the previous game.
Worth a look for everyone that enjoyed the original game.