While Alan Wake shines in atmosphere, the gameplay is clearly what brings it down.
The game is far from being bad, Remedy has been making sure, for five years, that the game gets released in a perfect condition, and in a way, the five years were worth the wait. The player follows Alan and his wife Alice into a very Twin Peak-esque town called Bright Falls where the couple is to take their holidays and Alan is to take a break from writing. Remedy has done an amazing job in creating such a town and the landscapes in the game are amazing. But my biggest gripe with the game when it comes to graphics are facial expressions and lipsyncing. To be brief: they're pretty awful. The sequence with Alan's wife on the boat, for example, is far from the quality one would expect these days, she has the stiffest and least expressive face I have seen in a while, and even though the voice acting is decent, the lipsync is just horrible, it made me think the game was first done in Finnish then revoiced in English. Besides that, the game is great to look at, as long as your far from any face that's talking or trying to convey emotions. The forests and enemies really do add to the oppressiveness of the ambience and it is clear that Remedy has done its very best to create a visual experience.
Remedy has once again managed to present the game in a unique fashion. Instead of opting for a comic book fashion, Alan Wake is presented like a series with multiple episodes and I was quite surprised as to how well this works. Each episode begins with a recap of the previous one, meaning that you can pretty much pick up the game at any time and still be aware of what's going on, also in the menu you can re-watch previous cutscenes which can help the player refresh his memory or just revisit confusing parts of the plot. Like Max Payne, Alan Wake narrates the game as you go, making it really seem as if he is narrating a book he wrote.
The plot, as I have stated before, is interesting and pushes the player to finish the game. Remedy has used its influences from pop-culture to enrich its story, and this works very well: The Shining, Stephen King's books in general, Alfred Hitchcock and Twin Peaks are some of its main resources and the references are clear and fun to notice. Of course, since Remedy is surely going to be developing a new Alan Wake, the end is presented in a cliffhanger sort of way, and it works, yet still remains a bit confusing in my opinion. My only main problem with the plot is character development. Alan Wake is trying to save his wife who's been kidnapped. It is clear that Remedy is trying to make the player feel something, make him want to save Alice but this isn't achieved at any moment in the game. Towards the end of the game I was more concerned about Alan's friend Barry than I ever was for Alice, and unfortunately that just doesn't help the plot. But besides that, the interest of finding out what happens next in the story still made me want to go through the game.
While the graphics, presentation, and story make the game interesting, the biggest problem Alan Wake has is gameplay. While the controls are good and easy to pick up, the repetitiveness of the action scenes simply make the game boring to play through at times. The gameplay sums up to shining the light on the enemy, shooting him, repeating the process over and over. This may seem ok at first, but due to the amount of enemies you'll go through and the fact that it's the only way you can play through, it just gets tedious, and the end can be a bit painful to get through.
Having bought the limited collector's edition, I still find it important to talk about it. With the game came a bonus DVD and a book, and I must say that the book really adds to the atmosphere of the game. I read it before playing the game as I received it during exam periods, and it was always cool to discover things in the game that I had read up on, it really gave the collector's edition a reason to exist besides a soundtrack and a bonus dvd. This doesn't mean that the bonus DVD is bad, it's just the making of, it gives some good details about what's going on behind the game, but it's only enjoyable when you finish it. On the other hand, the 10 track OST isn't that great, and I doubt I'll be listening to it much.
Even without the Collector's Edition, Alan Wake is a game any horror/thriller fanatic should at least pick up and try, even with its redundant gameplay the story and atmosphere are still great, making anyone who enjoyed the game wait to see what will happen next (as long as it doesn't take another 5 or so years of development.).