After nearly two years since its brooding debut, the Alan Wake series returns. Yet is American Nightmare an essential purchase or merely a downloadable curiousity?
By Leo Stiles
Alan Wake developer Remedy have played things far too coy in the lead-up to their latest release. Was this new Alan Wake game a sequel or a spin off or something entirely new set within the game’s universe?
Well, it turns out that American Nightmare is another slice of Alan Wake and one that sacrifices much of the original’s tension and atmosphere in favour of the (still excellent) light-based combat.
If that sounds a bit negative then let’s be clear; American Nightmare is one the best examples of a downloadable game you could hope to find on the Xbox but despite its obvious pleasures, Remedy and gamers might have been better served by a truer sequel to the excellent first game.
American Nightmare kicks off quickly with Alan Wake transported to the location of Night Springs, the fictional town that was constantly playing on TVs throughout the original game. Quite what brought him inside his own fictional universe remains unclear but it seems to mixed up with the machinations of his evil alter ego, Mr Scratch.
The ludicrous story is part of the game’s charm but the b-movie pulp is a poor substitute for the creeping tension and brooding atmosphere of the original – think Dean Koontz rather than Stephen King and you’ll get the idea.
Thankfully all the pulp fiction shenanigans is just window dressing for the excellent combat that forms the core of the title. The flashlight augmented gunplay that worked so well before returns with the interplay between burning the Taken with your flashlight before finishing them off with bullets proving just as compelling as before.
The addition of more varied enemies and weapons are excellent improvements which keeps the game alive where the story disappoints. Areas of light that proved respite in the first game now serve as temporary refuges only as they only top up your health before fizzling out and forcing you to keep moving.
Another improvement is that the endless collectable manuscript pages now serve as a currency for bigger and better weapons rather than just
While the main game comes in at the five hour mark – an impressive length given that this is an XBLA title – there is the addition of the Arcade Action mode, which gives you ten minutes to survive until dawn as you are set on by waves of enemies. Yes, it’s yet another horde mode but the controls and combat are so well executed that it becomes compulsive stuff. Online leaderboards keeps it competitive and rounds out surprisingly meaty package
American Nightmare offers more than we had any right to expect from a downloadable Xbox game but in going off on a tangent rather than offering us a continuing slice of the Alan Wake story, American Nightmare falls a little short.
Ultimately this game is an experiment and if Remedy can use this model for future releases and deliver on the promise of the first game, then we might get the first episodic gaming series that really works.
Format: Xbox Live Arcade
Developer: Remedy Entertainment; Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ podcast – listen to the latest episode now!
