Alan Wake II Review

ign.com:

Thirteen years after his wife went missing in the small town of Bright Falls, author Alan Wake is trapped inside a Dark Place that he can’t seem to write himself out of. As I sit down to type out this review of Alan Wake II, I can somewhat empathize. This is just so incomparable to anything else I’ve played in recent memory that it’s tough to work out exactly where to start. Alan Wake II is a single-player adventure that seamlessly shifts from slow-burn psychological terror to frantic survival-horror action, from gorgeously rendered game worlds to striking full-motion video sequences, and from morbid investigations to show-stopping musical surprises. It’s bloody, it's bonkers, and for the most part it's utterly brilliant. Coming in at the tail end of a bumper-crop gaming year packed with absolute bangers, Alan Wake II still manages to burn as brightly as a freshly fired signal flare.

Spanning two wildly contrasting realities, Alan Wake II’s roughly 17-hour story manages to be far more coherent than that of the original – despite its substantial increase in complexity. We pick things up in present day Bright Falls, taking control of FBI Agent Saga Anderson, who’s been dispatched to the small lakeside town to investigate the latest victim in a series of ritualistic slaughters: a body found beside Cauldron Lake with a gaping hole where his heart used to be. Saga is an instantly likable addition to the weird world that Alan Wake shares with Remedy Entertainment’s other supernatural game, Control. She’s dedicated to her casework but not above a bit of playful banter with her partner, Special Agent Alex Casey, and these opening couple of hours of mostly combat-free procedural investigation give the story a realistic grounding