Just finished Alan Wake - took me about 8 hours.
For my review, let me start with a little disclaimer. I hate the horror genre as it pertains to movies and video games. I find horror literature interesting, but there is basically nothing about horror movies (and the games that ape them) that isn't cliche. It's a genre that basically has 3 moves, and just repeats them ad nauseum.
That said, there were definitely things I liked about Alan Wake. The characters and story were reasonably well crafted, and the light + shooting mechanics worked well, and could have made for interesting combat if it wasn't for the non-stop horror cliche-fest that was pretty much every level of the game.
Seriously, how many times can a game take control from the character, make the controller shake, and play some creepy notes of music whole making something in the background fall before it gets old? For me, it was about 3, but this game managed to do it about 70 times over the course of the campaign. I know games are repetitive by their nature, but the idea is to repeat the fun parts, not the eye-roll worthy pseudo-scary nonsense. Does anybody actually get scared by this stuff? To make an out-of-genre analogy, it's like going to a comedy movie where the cast does nothing but repeat the same 3 puns for hours on end.
Still, I did play the game all the way through to the end, and not just because I wanted a +1 for this thread. From the end of the second episode until the game finished, I found myself quite invested in the game's unfolding events. (With the obvious exception of the events that happen when you actually play the game) The game even mechanically worked quite well - if only they'd have used it to make some interesting levels rather than hours of one-note drudgery.
Overall Score - 3/5
This puts me at 9 Finished:4 bought for a score of +5
Edit - as an aside, I'd like to see a game that uses this mechanic is a less annoying setting. Perhaps a sci-fi game where enemies are covered in plasma armor that you have to strip off with a particle beam. They could even have different colored armors that would require beam-color switching. Having environmental barriers using the armor could even open a metroidvania aspect.
