Some of you might remember how I got totally pissed off when Remedy totally
sold out to Microsoft, and then Microsoft decided that Remedy's new game
would be published for the Xbox360 only (which I didn't own) as some kind
of marketing ploy. Then the only logical reaction I had to this stupid
marketing ploy was to fall for it, and I just went and bought an Xbox360.
So you could say that I bought the console just to play Alan Wake. (Well,
not really, but it's true that this situation was the final straw that
made me do it.)

  So, is the game any good, or was all this just a huge waste of money?

  Graphically the game is superb. I especially like how everything, and
I mean *everything*, casts dynamic shadows, which works especially well
in this type of game both to increase visual quality and to enhance the
overall mood (lighting is quite an essential element of the gameplay and
story). Sometimes I just play around with a flashlight just to see the
dynamic shadows of the scenery move around. The graphics engine feels
also otherwise quite polished, as I have yet to see any graphical glitches
anywhere (sometimes in some games you will see some erroneous pixels here
and there, at the edges of polygons or shadows, random pixels due to
coincident surfaces, etc, but not here). It also helps that the game seems
to use antialiasing, so it diminishes any annoying aliasing artifacts which
may happen in small details.

  That's not the only thing that feels polished. After having played several
games where the controls feel unpolished and a bit hard to use, this game
feels a lot better in this matter. One would think that getting the movement
and camera controls to work properly with the thumbsticks would be a trivial
thing to do, but deducing from many games where they suck, it's probably not
so.

  The story is very strong. In fact, the game is extremely story-oriented.
The game has been sometimes criticized for being very linear, but I suppose
that with such a heavy emphasis on story-telling it's understandable.

  Overall, not a bad game. I have definitely played much, much worse games.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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