That doesn’t mean it’s bad, Alan Wake is alright. It just means it’s underwhelming compared to other games you could be playing.
The main issue is that you’re fighting humans. That naturally limits the enemy variety and combat options when you could instead be fighting monsters, aliens, demons, zombies, etc.
You’ll see the same small pool of enemy types over and over, and they’re all handled in the exact same way. Shine the light on them until they’re vulnerable, and then shoot until dead. There’s no strategy to it. By comparison, Dead Space was about shooting limbs off of zombie-aliens, and there were at least a dozen enemy types that fought differently from one another.
It doesn’t help that enemies in Alan Wake can literally spawn behind you without the game letting you know, which ALWAYS sucks. On top of that, when an enemy hits you, you stagger and are open to even MORE attacks while being completely unable to stop them. That has never been fun in any game ever.
Normally I don’t talk about performance, but this game went over the edge. On Xbox One S, Alan Wake Remastered is an unpolished, headache inducing mess. With extremely choppy frame rates, blinding visuals, and horrible contrast. It baffles me that this can even be called a remaster. There are AAA games from 2024 that look and run far better than this on the same console.
