Alan Wake's American Nightmare (Review)

Alan Wake's American Nightmare was released in February as part of the annual Xbox Live House Party. Despite owning the Alan Wake title, many of the original game's features and its story, developers Remedy describe American Nightmare as a "follow-up" as opposed to a sequel, proceeding to state that it's a stand alone title which only serves to expand the Wake universe. In one interview, one of the members described the original game as 2/3 story and 1/3 action, whereas this title is the opposite way round. To be honest though, this title feels like it contains 1/10 story. The game is so centred around action that fans of the original will spend most of the game wondering when the fiction of the series will actually be advanced.

American Nightmare takes place in Night Springs- a location fans of the original game will remember from its occasional referencing. Wake, a hit writer who has been suffering from writer's block in the first game, worked on the writing of several episodes of a Twilight Zone-like television series by the title of Night Springs. In this title, Alan finds himself in Night Springs hunting down the "herald of darkness", a mysterious antagonist by the name of Mr. Scratch, who is in fact the evil doppelgänger of Wake himself, created by the dark force Alan fought in his previous outing. Mr. Scratch is the culmination of all of the writers' dark side. In turn, Mr. Scratch is just a huge metaphor of fighting darkness, and in this case, your inner darkness. This is something the series revolves around; the eternal battle of light versus darkness.

The hazy styling of this title just screams B-movie, Tarantino-style. 

The combat of this title (which serves as the action you experience) is pretty much untouched. In the first game, you were armed with a torch and various different guns. In order to weaken enemies- the Taken, psychotic humans hell-bent on maiming you to death with knifes, chainsaws and any other lethal instruments as a result of their possessing by darkness- you must first break down the aurora of darkness which surrounds them by shining your torch on them, or breaking down multiple barriers at once using flash bangs or flares. Only once the barrier is broken can they be damaged by your fire-power. This stays the same in American Nightmare, albeit with the introduction of various new weapons including nail guns, hunting rifles and sub-machine guns, and  some new enemy types. These are all welcome additions to the combat: it's fast-paced, cinematic, and often very tense. Whilst none of the new additions are anything evolutionary, they do help to spruce the action up a bit. The new enemies are cleverly designed- Splitters, who duplicate every time you shine your torch onto them, causing you to rethink your tactics, bombardier-type enemies who throw explosives from a distance and various others. It's good that the combat is relatively varied- because the rest of the game is pretty repetitive.

My biggest problem with American Nightmare is the repetitiveness. I'm a gamer who's a sucker for variation, and so when the game revealed to me that I had to replay the same three levels, not once, not twice, but three times over, I was nearly tempted to stop playing. The game is divided up into the three seperate locations, each baring a single NPC who dishes out your objectives. In the long run, the whole aim of the game is to acquire a definitive manuscript page which depicts the conditions of a final location, which once set correctly will rewrite fate, and defeat Mr. Scratch. The problem is, the first couple of times, the page you receive is not complete. Due to the in-completion of the page the first time, Scratch manages to lock Wake into a constant time-loop, allowing him to proceed with his evil aims of never allowing the sun to rise again so that the dark presence will thrive and Scratch can control Wake's life forever. Using the time-loop, Wake can return to the three locations again in an attempt to try and complete the page and rewrite fate permanently. In the interest of the story element, which is rather minuscule in the end, Remedy force you to play the same levels three times around, and although they are slightly shorter as you progress, the game does suffer for it.

One of the new enemy types. Get too close and things definitely
aren't going to end well.

That is the only major niggle I have with this title. The rest is pretty enjoyable, and for the most part you can certainly see from the location design that Remedy pour a lot of detail and love into their games. Another small addition that is incredibly welcome is the chance to engage with a few more lines of dialogue with each character, something which I was dying to have in the first game. There are also various impressive cutscenes, acted out by real life actors, which look stunning. The fact that the game also now has a proper villain, who's psychotic ramblings are intriguing and exciting, also improves the small story element. Adding replay value is the collectable manuscript pages (which don't just serve as a collectable but also to expand the narrative) and also an Arcade mode which strips the gameplay down to pure combat, giving you ten minutes to survive hordes of Taken and raise your score over ten different locations. A multiplayer option would have been nice, but not highly necessary considering it's already a fun enough mode which adds a few extra hours of gameplay to the title, or dozens if you're someone who's keen on trying to beat the best of the world leaderboards.

In the end, American Nightmare is a satisfying enough title. If you're a fan of the original who enjoyed the game's psychological thriller story, which was perhaps the game's biggest strong point, then you'll feel slightly empty throughout, but Remedy do manage to redeem themselves slightly with a satisfying end. Go into American Nightmare with the right mind-frame and you'll see it as exactly what it is- a fun title purely there to broaden the series'. It's not the sequel that we're waiting for, but that's not what it's trying to be. Gameplay could have been varied a bit more, but it could have gone far worse. The perfect balance of story and tense action would have perhaps struck perfection- but I guess we'll have to wait for Alan Wake 2 for that.

7/10