A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, in a processor demonstration held by Intel at the IDF 2006. They showed a then unnamed game under development by Finnish developers Remedy. The fathers of Max Payne. They introduced it as the first game to not only use, but to require multi-core processors. They said it will fully benefit from 4-cores, and require at least a 2-core CPU to run. Of course we all had single core processors back then, so many people were concerned, or outraged, seeing the price tag on a quad core or even dual core CPU. But everyone had one thing in common. We were all amazed at the real time weather effects and realistic tornadoes they showcased. I won't be reviewing that game today. Because that game was never released.
Instead more than half a decade later, they released something that is curiously similar to the concepts they showed back then. This is the game I'll review.
And so what happened to that original game that would've blown our minds? Well it was devoured by greed. Microsoft could write enough zeros on a check, that made Remedy forget about their principles. And so by changing some aspects of the story and removing the most forward looking features from the game, they created Alan Wake. A game that was XBOX 360 exlusive for almost two years. In layman's terms Remedy have sold their souls. So much so, that they even declared that there will be no PC version of the game, because it wouldn't be good if not played from a couch, so it will be exclusive to XBOX360. So that's how a game proudly demoed on a PC became XBOX exclusive.
But later in December 2011, they decided, that after sinking the knife in the back of the PC gaming community, they now want to milk them for some money as well. You guessed, they announced they'll be releasing a PC version after all. But don't think for a moment that this PC version has anything to do with the one they demoed on a Quad Core processor back in 2006. No this is a cheap port of the XBOX360 version. This means that the graphics is dated, and there are no real time weather effects and tornadoes here. This is a console port where they didn't bother to add any value as "remedy" for the stab in the back. Even with all the overhead created by the PC drivers and APIs. The game only uses ~300MBytes of memory on a PC. The apologists will say that's because Remedy can optimize, but you don't need to optimize a game to run on 300mbytes of ram in 2012, everyone had multiples of that in their PC. This is simply a game tailored to the capabilities of the XBOX360.
With the knife in my back, I had the bleakest views of the game from the get-go. And seeing the poor graphics didn't help either. And on top of that I realized that the game is completely linear. Every fibre of my body told me, to not waste my time with it, just quit and forget. And had I done that I would've had no regrets at that point. But now I know that there is one saving grace for the game, the story.
So after the story started to become apparent the knife slowly halted it's twisting. And some other good aspects of the game come to the surface. Like the battles, with "monsters" I say battles, for they really felt more than just simple fights. You can only kill enemies in the game, if you break away the darkness protecting them with some sort of light source. And this lead to very interesting tactical dilemmas in the game. You can't just go guns blazing and be done with it, you have to formulate strategies to take down enemies. Killing enemies in the game is rewarding in itself, since it means your strategy was good.
Another strong point of the game is the soundtrack. It has some amazing original music, by the Poets of the Fall, and some other great tracks as well. I'll be eternally thankful to them, for introducing the music of Anna Ternheim to me.
+
- Interesting and original story, you truly want to explore it, you can't foresee the twists
- Gameplay (fighting)
- Music
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- Graphics looks dated, the only thing makes it look better than the console version is the higher resolution and better filtering algorithms
- Linear corridor maps all the way.
- There is no variation in opponents, all the same henchmen from beginning to end
- The view is from a weird rotated angle, so in order to go straight you have to look to the side slightly. I always kept bumping into things or walking in a zigzag even after hours of play, it's so unnatural.
- I didn't much fancy the ending.
- The game ends unexpectedly, there is no indication that you're nearing the end, even the final bossfight is so easy that I thought that it was just a test or a first phase, and the real task comes only after, and then the end credits started to roll.
Scoring card:
graphics/realization: 3/10
story/atmosphere: 9/10
gameplay/controls: 7/10
overall impression: 7/10
It's an enjoyable, and addictive game due to the story, but the technological leaps they teased with are nowhere to be found. This is not the game to boost the sales of quad-core processors. The only company I despise more after this is Papyrus entertainment (now iRacing), who truly only view gamers as coincows to milk for money. They even threatened modders with legal action who dared improve their games without them getting a piece of it.