A.W. starts brilliantly but quickly becomes monotonous and flat: simply just not enough variation to justify its length.
Instead what we have is a game that starts out brilliantly but all too quickly fades into monotony, its plot and rhythms ultimately about as exciting and evolutionary as its extremely gray protagonist, the development of who's character is stagnant even in comparison to the light-relief sidekick making strictly brief and sporadic appearances in only a few of the levels.
It's not that Alan Wake is a bad game - it's not - the game-play is very good. It's just that it's so very flat and monotonous that the excellent effect it's able to create is quickly deadened by an almost total lack of any kind of counterpoint or contrast.
If Remedy were to have spent more time in creating a game with an even balance of its main aspects (i.e. combat, driving and storytelling), and less time in both polishing eye candy and generating long long long maps of basically the same woodland type areas, (even if at half the length) they could have created a truly outstanding game.
As it is Alan Wake is so very repetitive and flat that it eventually begins to feel like an extremely highly-polished tech-demo stretched to absurd lengths.
This is an incredible shame, since initially, the atmosphere it creates is both thrilling and extremely evokative but there's just so little contrast and such little respite from running about in the darkness, that the atmosphere quickly looses its potency and the game actually begins to become a little tedious.
At first the thought of fighting your way through the dark to the next secure little nest of friendly faces all too willing to offer help and ready to advance the expected "intricate" storyline is both fun and exhilarating, but this quickly fades, more or less as soon as you realise that there are so few of these contrasting episodes that they're the exception rather than the rule and where they are present they're extremely brief and extremely underdeveloped in comparison to either the horizon of expectation created in the run up to the game's release, or to what you might expect from a suspense-thriller type narrative.
Ultimately In comparison to the amount of time spent wandering about the woods, Alan Wake's story is extremely sparse and the driving sections (considering it was originally intended to be an open-world game) virtually non-existent. What we're left with is a "cut'n'shut" game with far too much wandering about in the woods and far too little plot, especially since most of the story comes from the manuscript pages and radio broadcasts that have to be searched for by, you guessed it: more or less walking around in circles in the woods.
The reason Alan Wake didn't get full marks is, probably, because if it were an essay it would have been marked down for arriving way past its due-date, focusing so much on one aspect of the topic that it disregarded almost two thirds of the subject and because as such it would have been an extremely flat read.
What the Alan Wake franchise does have however is masses of potential but even this seems to work against it, since considering what it could have been, it just looks all the more flawed in comparison.
I personally would have preferred to see it weigh in at half the length but with a more even balance between narrative, combat and driving and with plenty of plot set amongst warm, welcoming company and friendly environments as counterpoint to the horror. I'd even go as far to say that I'd prefer to purchase Alan Wake as a more fully-realised episodic story in shorter installments, if that's what it would take to get the writing, plot and storylines up to T.V. drama quality.
It has such huge potential that I'm very excited to see how the Alan Wake franchise can be developed and improved upon. I only hope it gets a sequal.