Alan Wake's American Nightmare Review

With a few notable exceptions, video games – even the ones that brand themselves as "horror" – aren't that scary. This is also true, by and large, of movies, books, you name it. It's hard to scare people, to really scare them; just as hard as it is to make them laugh or cry. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Alan Wake's American Nightmare, much like the game it expands upon (Alan Wake), isn't frightening in the slightest. What come as a shocker, however, is the fact that it's so damn fun.

Presenting itself as an episode of a Twilight Zone-esque television show called "Night Springs," complete with a Rod Serling soundalike narrator, Alan Wake's American Nightmare sees the titular hero facing off against an evil manifestation of himself, called Mr. Scratch. Scratch has taken up residence in a small Arizona town, and has turned most of the population into zombie-like hostiles called "the taken." Much of Alan Wake's American Nightmare's gameplay involves dealing with the taken, who attack Wake at regular intervals. The taken are usually protected by a cloak of shadows, which must be "burned" away using Wake's flashlight beam before he can then employ firearms to permanently put them on the other side of the dirt. Dodging enemy melee attacks is a heavily emphasized element of the gameplay: successfully doing it both slows down time and lets Wake get some distance from bad guys.

At first, this dodge-and-shoot, third-person zombie bashing is a pretty cool mechanic, as the variety of conventional and light-based weapons (i.e., flares, flashbangs) and the game's first three maps provide a solid initial challenge (along with a decent, if rather pathetically Stephen King-wannabe-ish storyline). But things start to lose their luster when you play those first three maps a second time, immediately after completing them. And then, after completing those, you play them a third time. Sure, Alan Wake's American Nightmare truncates them a bit and saves you some time, but you're still playing the same maps, fighting basically the same enemies, and finding the same equipment, three damn times in a row. Even if the story weren't told through the clumsy mechanic of finding lost journal entries, it would still wear thinner than a politician's veneer of trustworthiness after two complete repetitions of the same stuff.

And the same is true of the gameplay, at least in the story mode. There are only so many times you can dodge the same arc of electricity, or fight the same zombified fireman, before you start to ask yourself if your leisure time couldn't be better spent watching your hard drive defragment. But, weirdly, I did keep on doing it. And I kept coming back again, and again. There's something bizarrely enthralling about Alan Wake's American Nightmare – something that drew me in, despite its on-paper shortcomings.

Part of the reason for this is that the game's simple, third-person shooter mechanic is surprisingly fun to play with. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the game's Arcade Mode. Here, Wake is pitted for 10 minutes against waves of increasingly difficult zombies (or one continuous wave if you play in Nightmare difficulty), on small maps strewn with items and ammo that you can collect between waves -- or during, if you're a true badass. Points are earned for enemies killed, and streaks of killings build up your score multiplier, as does successfully dodging enemy attacks. Like the Survival Mode in Resident Evil 5 (although it lacks that game's co-operative multiplayer), something about Alan Wake's American Nightmare's Arcade Mode keeps you coming back for more, to see if you can't surpass your score and kick even more ass in ten minutes. Because weapons are unlocked in Arcade Mode by collecting more journal entries in Story Mode, you're encouraged to play both, and online leaderboards are there so you can compare your abilities with others' as you get better and better.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/29/alan-wakes-american-nightmare-review-2