I wanted to like this game, I REALLY did. The positives: the characters and interactions are extremely charming. You could really tell the small dev team loved making this game and it was a passion project. The battle system is kind of interesting where you could go against more enemies at once for higher XP return. Additionally, character "abilities" and bond system are fine and actually help.

The negatives: Start is really shaky - gameplay isn't engaging and story is all over the place trying to throw you into a new world. This does get alleviated after the intro and you get more gameplay introduced and the world opens up. The middle point is fun and interesting and bosses can be workaround'd with their gimmicks even when lower level.
But damn, the last third of the game STRETCHES and DRAGS like no other game I played before. it devolves into insane grinding where if you don't have maxed out character levels/talents, there's no point even trying to play the late game. All enemies go up in stats and elemental weaknesses reduce (checked bestiary) to force the player to grind to pad game time. Due to the smaller audience of the game, guides are hard to come by except for the final boss which is pretty much impossible without close to maxed out everything. I've never been frustrated this much from a game.

If this game stayed as charming and unique as it was in the midpoint, it would easily be an 8/10.

This game is a welcome surprise as an entry-level experience into metroidvanias. Succinct, fair ramp-up, and with a neat twist of the dual-colors mechanic. Especially near the end, the challenge really ramps up and makes you use all the tools you learnt throughout the game.

Being an older game, clunkiness from technical limitations make it feel a little less responsive (ex: grappling or wall sliding). Overall platforming feels rough for a 2D platformer because of it. The final boss is especially challenging due to the clunkiness. I also feel the waypoint marker defeats some of the player exploration, but at least reduce frustration in where to go next.

But hot damn, the art style in this game really hits. It's a cool mix of 2d environments, 3d models silhouetted in the foreground, and great use of the dual colors to highlight the world/enemies/obstacles. It aged super well and hopefully will continue to with time.

It's only up from here in the metroidvania genre, so this is a good baseline to try.

For a 10+ year old game, I was genuinely surprised that - past the technical limitations of the time, the game is still genuinely fun and engaging to go through the story and complete some of the side activities.
I can't comment on the rest of the side activities like the hundreds of collectables or the radio towers/camps as there's a lot of "Ubisoft" padding that was avoided.
Past that, genuinely engaging gameplay and graphics that still look pretty good nowadays. Story was pretty good but the performances really sold the characters (other than MC Jason who sounded scrawny for a hardened killer lol).
Weapon unlocks and new equipment throughout the story kept things interesting. Set pieces were all also very fun (looking at you, skrillex weed and also classical music while Jason spits one liners)
I wanna give this a 7.8/10 since the Ubisoft padding and technical limitations mostly.

I genuinely enjoyed the game aspect of it. Very good graphics and feel-good movement. It's fun going through the open world once you understand how some parts funnel you through districts which sadly, reduces creativity.
Some parts of game were annoying with inconsistent heights for gameovers and a LOT of collectibles. Additionally, EA decided to take down the servers so now you can't get any achievements or do any UGC.

I really wanted to rate this game better as the graphics/gameplay/sound/music is really good. But the negatives bring it down... why is EA like this

Overall: A nice aside for the original Alan Wake with better gameplay/visuals but worse story.

Positives: Gunplay isn't as grating as the original, with the arcade mode there to provide some extra content. The visuals in my opinion are cleaner with better fidelity, though moment-to-moment, don't ooze the same atmosphere as the original style. The only exceptional performance was Mr. Scratch's live action stuff. It definitely sold a lot of the emotion and tension. Some set pieces and music choices was also pretty fun imo. Also, the manuscript pages were fun to read.

Negatives: The other performances were not as good as the original. Most of which seem to be stiffer and auto-generated with dialogue that doesn't flow as well. The story overall suffers as a result, with most of the game focusing on call-backs to the original and not really adding anything new to Alan Wake. The looping of the environments in service to the story also becomes annoying.

Interesting mountain climbing rogue-like with some good replayability if you decide to stick through a brand new game with every single side mission and progression reset.

Really cool concept and music clips hard in a good way. Though the repetitiveness, lack of polish in dialogue and some systems, as well as the unfulfilling story bring it down some.

Overall, still worth playing in shorter bursts to not burn out and lowering expectations due to the smaller team.

I tried. Got to the hell world and at that point, it felt like a slog to go through and not worth it with so many better challenging games requiring mechanical skill out there. I tried and gave this game a fair shot in my opinion.

Timings sometimes are pixel perfect (i.e. no creativity), unresponsive controls due to lack of buffering or correct input handling, grating music, meh art style, and a ;_; story.

I tried completing earlier levels and gaining bandages, which just asperated my above criticism.

I gave this game a couple of chances but it's difficult for me personally to keep at it. Let me know if I'm misjudging the cons in case the game opens up much further in the game, which it doesn't as you get to the middle of the U.S.

The pros: the art and voice acting for each story bit is a good touch... and that's about it. The actual stories are good and well written but they are each criminally short and lack engagement other than "do X" or "do Y" sometimes.

The cons:
- Visuals: The art style outside of the story section doesn't look good personally - seems to try to have a cell-shaded art style but is very flat and bland due to the world being simple. Also, there's this weird shimmering that is very noticeable on the docked display where during story sections, both the text box and the actual image shimmer annoyingly. This doesn't happen in other switch games.
- Audio: the same 3 tracks of folk music, gets pretty grating. Some of the voice-acting is actually good and sounds professional (narrator, hobo boy). Others sound like they're a random dev recording inside a cardboard box lol.
- Technical: performance is really bad for what the game is trying to achieve on the switch hardware. The radial menu to select stories is extremely finicky and at some points bugs out spamming a choice from the analog screen. Additionally, difficult menu navigation during storytelling.
- Gameplay: just.. walking. You can whistle which slightly increases speed and hitchhike, hop trains, and pay trains which is tedious to do (time, health, and money penalties respectively). It's all extremely slow.
- Progression: to complete the game, you have to track down 16 separate NPCs through the huge map of the U.S. (which is already really slow). You have to give the types of stories they ask for but even if you do, you could only progress them if you track them down somewhere else on the map and give them brand new stories they want to hear. This is done for each character, for multiple chapters, running after them a huge map that's tedious to navigate.

Ended up dropping it when I realized how tedious the game was, that it wasn't worth it to stick through for the more interesting micro-stories.