Alan Wake Reviews Round-Up

I saw a vid of the opening 10 minutes of the game on Eurogamer last night, and it does look very interesting (although the crummy voice over and cheesy B-grade dialogue would drive me insane).

Anyway, I understand why there’s so much hate for the game, I call it the “Fable-Spore effect”. Due to the hardware limitation of the xbox360, there’s no question that the game had been scaled down (not only in terms of what should have been DirectX10 visuals, but also in terms of the sheer scale of the game environment). It’s not entirely the game that was hyped in 2005. Anyone remember that cool video with that tornado ripping through the town? It’s a real pity because even though the xbox360 kicked it in the nuts, it still looks stunning (although the box is definitely showing its age now – I checked out the Halo Reach demo the other night, and yeah, the visuals on the box doesn’t have that “wow factor” anymore…). I think folks are just disappointed that after 5 years of hype, this is all we get, a short 10 hour game that can easily be finished over a weekend). I suppose if you compare that to something like Red Dead which hopefully will be like GTA4 in terms of game length and extras, Alan Wake just doesn’t seem economical.

I’ll probably eventually rent it, borrow it from a friend or pick it up when I find it in the bargain bin.