This review contains spoilers
A sequel 13 years in the making, or rather like, 8-10 years in wishing it could happen and 3-5 in the making, Alan Wake 2 is the long awaited sequel to Remedy's cult classic, Alan Wake.
I'm not going to go into the history of why the game couldn't happen, or the first game's struggles, but I will mention that it's beautiful to finally see this game come out, and be not only the best game Remedy has released ever, but probably my favorite game that released last year.
I was writing a synopsis that leads into the review, but it's a bit lengthy and wordy, and this is a spoiler tagged review anyhow, so I'll just jump into this, contextless spoilers may be ahead, and I'm going to be more negative than positive just because I can note the negative things a lot better.
I loved the story for the game, I loved all the twists, and how predictable they were if you paid attention to everything that goes on in all of their games.
Where Alan Wake 1 was a loveable B-movie horror experience, (even if I'm not sure they intended it to be) Alan Wake 2 is the real blockbuster deal, with writing and gameplay actually taking notes from horror media, with such creative ideas like, tension and setpieces, instead of walking through empty forests for 12 hours.
Starting off with Saga's campaign, from the get go she's an interesting perspective, and a good one to start with, it puts you in the shoes of someone unfamiliar with the town and lets you ease into the world of the game, and she makes a great partner with her buddy cop Max Pa-I mean, Alex Casey.
Writing wise she's interesting, a bit down to earth (surprising, for an FBI agent) and generally quite likeable, there's not really much to say about her as she's not much of a dynamic character in premise, the most interesting thing you can say about her is said to you directly by an NPC in one of the final chapters, that she's a statement for the difficulty of a work life balance or something like that.
I do have a fair few criticisms for how her character was handled though.
One, she's a fucking terrible detective, I get that the story acknowledges this at the end in a way, but it just makes parts of the story feel like a sluggish idiot plot as Saga refuses to entertain the thought of "hey maybe this isn't Wake out of the dark place and its just Scratch" or "if the cult failed a ritual on Nightingale, and he became a Taken anyways, maybe they want to stop the Taken and not create them, which would clear up all the confusing evidence"
Sure, the Scratch thing isn't true, but the story sets Saga up in a position to be doubtful, but the only reason she DOESN'T give Alan the clicker is because he gets possessed by Scratch and kicks up a fit right before she can hand it to him, all she said was "make sure logan is ok :)"
Two, the whole distressed mother thing started to get a bit grating, she's an FBI agent, and for fucks sake, she's clearly dealing with forces of unknown magnitude, and she's the most held up about her daughter maybe or maybe not being okay, I get it, a parent would be hurt and it's a strong story point, but they push too hard on it and it doesn't reflect the stakes properly.
Three, Why is she supposed to be this protagonist who doesn't know much about the area she's in, and has her story written around not knowing how the Taken work (the cultists powered by darkness raving about shit are Taken, not cultists, this is obvious to anyone who played AW1!) when the game in general not only expects you to have played AW1, but also to have played Control, she doesn't even have any questions when the FBC rolls up, nothing like "Who the fuck are you guys?" or "I thought the FBI were the higher authority?" She just rolls up like she's just a local town cop, and they're the FBI, it's as if the FBC to them was just used as an excuse to do a "FBI, we'll take it for here" on a FBI agent.
You could make the claim that "oh well in this world the FBC is a known thing" when even if that was true, it's never deeply explained WHAT they do, and instead is just left in the air, the only question she ever asks the FBC is "wtf is a parautilitarian?"
Four, For her major twist of the story, the Cult not being bad, it's done badly because unlike the other major twists, even though the game gives you plenty of resources to figure it out, it just enforces an idiot plot to make it unclear to the protagonist until it happens, with the most egregious example being right before Scratch attacks Saga for the first time, where you have the Koskela brothers in jail wasting their time saying "Grr fuck u police bitch" instead of "HEY WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS YOU MADE A MISTAKE DO NOT GIVE SCRATCH THE CLICKER"
Writing for Alan is a lot better, you're dealing with the twisted areas of the Dark Place, and you get to deal with Mr. Door, a mysterious fellow, Thomas Zane who while answering a bunch of things, still leaves you with more questions than answers (is he a filmmaker or a poet?) and generally indulges you heavily in Alan's place in the story, as well as referencing the first game a TON.
Gameplay in general is a blessing, Remedy has finally done it, for the first time since Max Payne 2, Remedy has made a game that is fun to play, there's still a few snags like guns being a little bit less precise than they should be, or the dodge not being as responsive when it comes to dodging projectiles or the very stabby Shadows/Taken, but the issues have gone from miserable to ignorable, If it wasn't for the fact that the puzzles were almost nonexistent or really easy, this would go toe to toe with some of the modern Resident Evil games.
For the one thing that's totally unique to the game compared to most other survival horror games though, the Flashlight, it's still not much better than it was in AW1, it's just a weird sidegrade, flashlight boosts are a weird system that just adds another resource to manage, while being a buggy system that's imprecise, requires you to use 1 whole charge at a time when an enemy only gets stunned if you use 100% of a charge, constantly making you waste a second, and for some reason you can cancel using a charge? This would be fixed heavily if aiming in with the flashlight did some small damage to shields overtime, kind of like in the first game.
That and the boss fights all suck, like they're really bad, I don't know why Remedy is so bad at making boss fights any fun at all, also shotguns, I don't know why the shotguns in this game are all bad, it shouldn't take 2 shots to the face to kill a guy when 3 revolver shots does the same thing.
Oh yeah, and the jump-scares are terrible, they don't add any tension they're just a sudden loud noise covering your screen and it's annoying as hell, it's good that you can turn them down but you should honestly be able to turn them off entirely, they add nothing of value even when they're just sudden -POP- transitions for things or characters appearing or disappearing.
Gameplay wise Saga is by far the worse out of the two, she has a terrible pistol, taking twice as many shots to the head to kill as Alan's revolver, but with a similar ammo economy and reload time, and also instead of having a flare gun, she has the shitty rocket flares, and she generally has more enemies, and more enemy types (particularly the annoying and/or tank-y ones)
Also she's the one that has ALL boss battles, so.
Mind palace is whatever, the case board kind of doesn't do anything useful outside of the final chapter, so the place is kind of just a cop-out stuffed with exposition so that Alan wasn't the only one with the impressive SSD utilizing swap feature.
Dark Ocean Summoning was neat, but not as cool as We Sing, it's more of a Anderson Farm type affair from AW1, where We Sing is more of an Ashtray Maze.
Alan's gameplay on the other hand, is pretty fun, and by fun I mean tense, you're constantly moving past Shadows that may or may not turn out to be real Shadows that will beat the fuck out of you, using his revolver and flare gun feel even better than they did in the first game, and while the plot swapping thing and light bulb thing is a bit of a shallow gimmick for linear progression, it is admittedly really cool seeing all the different areas and things just -POP-ing in and out of existence.
We Sing was fun as hell too, what a great one of a kind experience.
This game is a love-letter to both Alan Wake, the game that while being a bit of a cult classic, just wasn't meant to be for the longest time, and Remedy games in general, indulging heavily in Control, a bit of Quantum Break, Alan Wake 1, and even Max Payne (R.I.P James, the night opened to let you in.)
It's a blessing to survival horror, and a work of art for the video game medium, managing to be cinematic but not sacrificing gameplay, their use of FMVs and special effects to set these scenes and transitions and all the effects of the enemies and all of their incredibly beautiful sets are just master class, and I'm so excited to see what the future holds for the developers, I will 100% be pre-ordering Control 2, and I really hope this time around they can even figure out a way to make Control fun to play that time around.
Play this damn game, Play all of Remedy's games, experience the biggest boon for video game storytelling in the AAA space in years, their entire studio bleeds with passion from their developers, to their directors, to their actors.
I'm not going to go into the history of why the game couldn't happen, or the first game's struggles, but I will mention that it's beautiful to finally see this game come out, and be not only the best game Remedy has released ever, but probably my favorite game that released last year.
I was writing a synopsis that leads into the review, but it's a bit lengthy and wordy, and this is a spoiler tagged review anyhow, so I'll just jump into this, contextless spoilers may be ahead, and I'm going to be more negative than positive just because I can note the negative things a lot better.
I loved the story for the game, I loved all the twists, and how predictable they were if you paid attention to everything that goes on in all of their games.
Where Alan Wake 1 was a loveable B-movie horror experience, (even if I'm not sure they intended it to be) Alan Wake 2 is the real blockbuster deal, with writing and gameplay actually taking notes from horror media, with such creative ideas like, tension and setpieces, instead of walking through empty forests for 12 hours.
Starting off with Saga's campaign, from the get go she's an interesting perspective, and a good one to start with, it puts you in the shoes of someone unfamiliar with the town and lets you ease into the world of the game, and she makes a great partner with her buddy cop Max Pa-I mean, Alex Casey.
Writing wise she's interesting, a bit down to earth (surprising, for an FBI agent) and generally quite likeable, there's not really much to say about her as she's not much of a dynamic character in premise, the most interesting thing you can say about her is said to you directly by an NPC in one of the final chapters, that she's a statement for the difficulty of a work life balance or something like that.
I do have a fair few criticisms for how her character was handled though.
One, she's a fucking terrible detective, I get that the story acknowledges this at the end in a way, but it just makes parts of the story feel like a sluggish idiot plot as Saga refuses to entertain the thought of "hey maybe this isn't Wake out of the dark place and its just Scratch" or "if the cult failed a ritual on Nightingale, and he became a Taken anyways, maybe they want to stop the Taken and not create them, which would clear up all the confusing evidence"
Sure, the Scratch thing isn't true, but the story sets Saga up in a position to be doubtful, but the only reason she DOESN'T give Alan the clicker is because he gets possessed by Scratch and kicks up a fit right before she can hand it to him, all she said was "make sure logan is ok :)"
Two, the whole distressed mother thing started to get a bit grating, she's an FBI agent, and for fucks sake, she's clearly dealing with forces of unknown magnitude, and she's the most held up about her daughter maybe or maybe not being okay, I get it, a parent would be hurt and it's a strong story point, but they push too hard on it and it doesn't reflect the stakes properly.
Three, Why is she supposed to be this protagonist who doesn't know much about the area she's in, and has her story written around not knowing how the Taken work (the cultists powered by darkness raving about shit are Taken, not cultists, this is obvious to anyone who played AW1!) when the game in general not only expects you to have played AW1, but also to have played Control, she doesn't even have any questions when the FBC rolls up, nothing like "Who the fuck are you guys?" or "I thought the FBI were the higher authority?" She just rolls up like she's just a local town cop, and they're the FBI, it's as if the FBC to them was just used as an excuse to do a "FBI, we'll take it for here" on a FBI agent.
You could make the claim that "oh well in this world the FBC is a known thing" when even if that was true, it's never deeply explained WHAT they do, and instead is just left in the air, the only question she ever asks the FBC is "wtf is a parautilitarian?"
Four, For her major twist of the story, the Cult not being bad, it's done badly because unlike the other major twists, even though the game gives you plenty of resources to figure it out, it just enforces an idiot plot to make it unclear to the protagonist until it happens, with the most egregious example being right before Scratch attacks Saga for the first time, where you have the Koskela brothers in jail wasting their time saying "Grr fuck u police bitch" instead of "HEY WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS YOU MADE A MISTAKE DO NOT GIVE SCRATCH THE CLICKER"
Writing for Alan is a lot better, you're dealing with the twisted areas of the Dark Place, and you get to deal with Mr. Door, a mysterious fellow, Thomas Zane who while answering a bunch of things, still leaves you with more questions than answers (is he a filmmaker or a poet?) and generally indulges you heavily in Alan's place in the story, as well as referencing the first game a TON.
Gameplay in general is a blessing, Remedy has finally done it, for the first time since Max Payne 2, Remedy has made a game that is fun to play, there's still a few snags like guns being a little bit less precise than they should be, or the dodge not being as responsive when it comes to dodging projectiles or the very stabby Shadows/Taken, but the issues have gone from miserable to ignorable, If it wasn't for the fact that the puzzles were almost nonexistent or really easy, this would go toe to toe with some of the modern Resident Evil games.
For the one thing that's totally unique to the game compared to most other survival horror games though, the Flashlight, it's still not much better than it was in AW1, it's just a weird sidegrade, flashlight boosts are a weird system that just adds another resource to manage, while being a buggy system that's imprecise, requires you to use 1 whole charge at a time when an enemy only gets stunned if you use 100% of a charge, constantly making you waste a second, and for some reason you can cancel using a charge? This would be fixed heavily if aiming in with the flashlight did some small damage to shields overtime, kind of like in the first game.
That and the boss fights all suck, like they're really bad, I don't know why Remedy is so bad at making boss fights any fun at all, also shotguns, I don't know why the shotguns in this game are all bad, it shouldn't take 2 shots to the face to kill a guy when 3 revolver shots does the same thing.
Oh yeah, and the jump-scares are terrible, they don't add any tension they're just a sudden loud noise covering your screen and it's annoying as hell, it's good that you can turn them down but you should honestly be able to turn them off entirely, they add nothing of value even when they're just sudden -POP- transitions for things or characters appearing or disappearing.
Gameplay wise Saga is by far the worse out of the two, she has a terrible pistol, taking twice as many shots to the head to kill as Alan's revolver, but with a similar ammo economy and reload time, and also instead of having a flare gun, she has the shitty rocket flares, and she generally has more enemies, and more enemy types (particularly the annoying and/or tank-y ones)
Also she's the one that has ALL boss battles, so.
Mind palace is whatever, the case board kind of doesn't do anything useful outside of the final chapter, so the place is kind of just a cop-out stuffed with exposition so that Alan wasn't the only one with the impressive SSD utilizing swap feature.
Dark Ocean Summoning was neat, but not as cool as We Sing, it's more of a Anderson Farm type affair from AW1, where We Sing is more of an Ashtray Maze.
Alan's gameplay on the other hand, is pretty fun, and by fun I mean tense, you're constantly moving past Shadows that may or may not turn out to be real Shadows that will beat the fuck out of you, using his revolver and flare gun feel even better than they did in the first game, and while the plot swapping thing and light bulb thing is a bit of a shallow gimmick for linear progression, it is admittedly really cool seeing all the different areas and things just -POP-ing in and out of existence.
We Sing was fun as hell too, what a great one of a kind experience.
This game is a love-letter to both Alan Wake, the game that while being a bit of a cult classic, just wasn't meant to be for the longest time, and Remedy games in general, indulging heavily in Control, a bit of Quantum Break, Alan Wake 1, and even Max Payne (R.I.P James, the night opened to let you in.)
It's a blessing to survival horror, and a work of art for the video game medium, managing to be cinematic but not sacrificing gameplay, their use of FMVs and special effects to set these scenes and transitions and all the effects of the enemies and all of their incredibly beautiful sets are just master class, and I'm so excited to see what the future holds for the developers, I will 100% be pre-ordering Control 2, and I really hope this time around they can even figure out a way to make Control fun to play that time around.
Play this damn game, Play all of Remedy's games, experience the biggest boon for video game storytelling in the AAA space in years, their entire studio bleeds with passion from their developers, to their directors, to their actors.