A few years back, Microsoft Game Studios published a little game called Alan Wake, and now they are gearing up to release a stand-alone follow-up known as Alan Wake: American Nightmare as part of their upcoming Xbox Live House Party.
Alan Wake: American Nightmare isn’t necessarily a sequel to the original Alan Wake, per se. In American Nightmare, players find the titular character lost in a small midwestern town, fighting against ‘The Taken,’ local townspeople who are infected by a kind of smoky darkness. To fight against The Taken, Wake must blast them with a flashlight, to burn away the darkness, before blasting them with several conveniently placed firearms.
The game itself features different modes of play, to add a little variety to gamers’ experiences. Not only does the game feature a deep story-based campaign mode, described as “Alan living through an episode of the TV show he used to write,” but also a kind of horde mode where Alan has ten minutes to survive until dawn, fighting off increasingly more difficult waves of enemies.
The campaign mode is solid, and gives players more of Alan Wake, as they had been asking for since the release of the original. It is appropriately spooky and features several spine-chilling moments that fans are certain to love. But the real star is the game’s survival mode. Players not only have to manage their health and ammo, but also batteries to their flashlights. Without a working flashlight, they are dead in the water.
Alan Wake: American Nightmare has entertaining combat that is evocative of the recent Resident Evil games, though with a few refinements that make it handle more smoothly. Most entertaining to us is a simple dodge button, which sounds like nothing on its face, but last-minute dodges give the player a slow-motion cutscene of Alan barely dodging an attack – not only providing the player a short breather, but it also looks dramatic and very cool.
Alan Wake: American Nightmare is poised to give gamers more of what they want, and it’s coming soon. As part of the Xbox Live House Party, which kicks off mid-February, there isn’t a very long wait. Get those Microsoft Points ready
