My Top 10 Games of the Year

I haven’t written much in a while, which is something I have needed to rectify. So as we get ready to start 2012 I decided to commit to a list of my 10 favorite games this year.

Number 10: Modern Warfare 3

In a year where I felt a lot of shooter fatigue (more on that later) I still managed to squeeze a lot of fun out of Modern Warfare 3, even if I didn’t stick with it for very long. The CoD games get (deservedly) a lot of crap for being pushed out every year, and I agree. This year’s installment maybe the last time I fall for the yearly CoD game, but the multiplayer is one of the more balanced in the franchise and the campaign was fun enough when I turned off my brain and blasted through it that it earns a spot on my top 10 list.

Number 9: Gears of War 3

Much like MW 3, Gears 3 managed to be fun to me despite being a shooter. Epic really refined everything that makes a Gears game great. Whether it be the campaign that actually wraps up the story-line in a satisfactorily manner, the Horde mode that includes even more depth than before, or the competitive multiplayer being shined up and given dedicated server support to mitigate the host problems of the previous games, it is clear that Epic made sure that the last game in the series was a memorable one.

Number 8: Catherine

I love Atlus, they are one of my favorite Japanese developers. So when I heard that the team behind the Persona games were finally making a 360/PS3 game I couldn’t be any more interested. Even though Catherine’s gameplay wasn’t really my cup of tea, the story is what kept me pushing through. The presentation is great, from the graphics, to the voice acting and music, and the art direction. If only the gameplay was stronger this would be a lot higher up on my list, but it still satiated my need for the next Persona but only for a little while.

Number 7: Batman Arkham City

Batman Arkham Asylum is such a strong game that it is pretty hard to top. Arkham City may not exceed the lofty expectations of the first game, but it meets those expectations in fine form. Gliding around the city, taking out thugs, and working your way through the well written story are such a pleasure to do thanks to the well thought out control scheme. The best thing I can say about Arkham City is that it is the best Batman simulator that money can buy.

Number 6: King of Fighters XIII

2011 is the year in which I got HEAVILY invested in fighting games, if there is a tournament stream going you can bet your ass that I am watching it. In a year with quite a few fighting releases I think that KoF XIII stands above the rest. It is a bit of a meme in the fighting game community that this game contains “Real, honest fighting” and I couldn’t agree more. Everything in KoF needs to be worked for, there is no “easy button” (Hey there X-Factor) and for that I applaud SNK Playmore. Now get to work on fixing the online play.

Number 5: Super Mario 3D Land

The 3DS has had a rocky year, and early adopters really got the shaft. No amount of free NES and GBA games can take away the sting of the system you just bought getting a price drop of $70. I gave up on the 3DS early on this year when I traded in my launch unit, but man am I glad that I got another one along with a copy of 3D Land. When Nintendo makes a game on their own hardware, it really puts everyone else working on that hardware to shame. This can be both a good and bad thing, but man if 3D Land doesn’t just make me so happy when I am playing it. 3D Land represents the product of what can happen when Nintendo puts their best foot forward.

Number 4: Bastion

I ended up playing a lot of really interesting indie and downloadable games this year, but none of them left an impression on me quite like Bastion. Bastion doesn’t feel at all like the first game from a studio, Supergiant Games put so much care into this game that it is insane. No other game has gotten such an emotional response out of me this year, the music and narration really make this game unique. The gameplay is no slouch either, it is extremely responsive and offers a lot of ways to customize the different weapons and skills to tailor the game to how you want to play it. If Supergiant Games has managed to make such a good game their first time out, I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Number 3: Portal 2

Hey, as it turns out Valve are pretty darn good a making games. It amazes me that they were not only able to expand on the fairly modest framework of the first game, but also introduce meaningful story, characters, and gameplay mechanics while doing so. GladOS is once again great as the arch-enemy, and Wheatley is my favorite new character this year. Once again I felt that same rush I got in the first game when I solved a tough puzzle. Oh, and that ending: YOU SHOOT A PORTAL AT THE F’ING MOON.

Number 2: Rocksmith

What? I imagine that is what a lot of people will say when they see this as my number 2 pick. Rocksmith flew under my radar for pretty much a year. I (like I am sure countless others did) laughed it off immediately. “What, Ubisoft is making a rhythm game and it works by plugging in a real guitar through a USB cable? That isn’t gonna work.” Well guess what, it works, and it works great. If you had told me a few months ago, “Hey Nick, you will totally be able to play parts of Hangar 18 by Megadeth, and this video game will teach you how.” I would have though you were crazy. Hey, I can totally play parts of Hangar 18 now and that is freaking incredible seeing as how I haven’t seriously picked up a guitar until this game.

Number 1: Saints Row The Third

If the last game made you say,what?, then this one probably has you questioning my sanity. I have not had more fun with a game this year than I did with Saints Row. From beginning to end Volition presents the craziest and dumbest story in a game in the smartest way possible. Jump out of a plane, pull your parachute, drop kick through another plane, then parachute out of that one? Yup, we got that. Run around as a toilet in cyberspace with an arm cannon while the game simulates lag? Got that too. Not only does Saints Row set up these situations in the context of the story, but sets them up with a self awareness that has the characters in the game saying “Wait, we are doing what now?” It has a great soundtrack, great voice acting, great art style, and some of the best gameplay in an open world game out there. Everything I want to say about this game can be summed up in one sentence: Hey, you should play Saints Row.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Not everything this year was sunshine and happiness. Here are some of the games I didn’t much care for this year.

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3

I actually like UMvC 3, so why is it here? How about the fact that both the original MvC3 AND it’s revision came out in the same year? This is not acceptable by any means. When Capcom released Super SF4 after about a year it made a bit more sense, but this time it just felt like a scam.

LA Noire

When I first started playing LA Noire I was enthralled by the insane facial animations that Team Bondi created for the game, and for a while I liked the story quite a bit too. The closer I got towards the end of the game, the less and less I started to like it. By the time the end credits rolled, my interest in the game had bottomed out. The story just wraps up so poorly, it is a real shame too seeing as how Team Bondi will never get another shot at a sequel.

Skyrim

I will never deny to anyone that Skyrim is a good game, it just isn’t a game for me. The combat still feels slow and disconnected (especially after playing Dark Souls) and for a game that a lot of people say is dense with content the world feels empty at times. If I walk into one more cave that looks exactly the same as the other cave I walked into that had the exact same stupid ass vampires in it, I am gonna scream. Don’t even get me started on the stupid “Then I took an arrow to the knee” meme.

Battlefield 3

Probably my biggest disappointment of the year. I really liked Bad Company 2, and for a game that takes so many steps forward Battlefield 3 takes a lot of steps back in weird ways. Trying to go against MW3 was a bad idea, the campaign in this game was completely uninteresting, especially since the campaigns in the Bad Company games were really good and had a lot of really humorous moments. The game is gorgeous, there is no doubt about that, but it feels like there is less destruction which was one of the defining things about the Battlefield series to me. I just haven’t had fun in my time with BF3 and that is a real shame.

Review: Bulletstorm

From the first time I saw Bulletstorm I was interested in it. The concept sounded interesting and I am a huge sucker for arcade style scoring systems in games. It also helps that I thought Painkiller, the last People Can Fly game, was a ton of fun. The concern for me was always how the story and dialogue was going to turn out.

The game really doesn’t put it’s best foot forward, the beginning features a lot of tutorial and a lot of cursing but not a lot of what makes the game fun later on. You play as Grayson Hunt who, for a variety of reasons, isn’t the most likable person right of the bat. The game starts off with most of his posse getting killed and Ishi, the lone survivor of Hunt’s crew, now pretty much hating him.

Once the game gets past the setup, it starts to push past being just another FPS. The Skillshot system is my favorite addition to a shooter in a while and actually is at the core of much of the game’s design. Instead of trying the make the game about dodging enemy fire and only popping out to do headshots, you are rewarded for being creative with the game’s vast arsenal of weaponry. One of my favorite combos is using the leash on Grayson’s hand to pop all the enemies into the air, then using a charged shot from the pistol (appropriately named the Screamer)  to set everyone on fire. From there you can get even more points by using explosives to blow everyone up in mid-air. The game feels almost as free form as something like Halo because there are so many options for every encounter.

The game looks great, this is one of the best uses of Unreal Engine 3 in quite some time. That makes sense though seeing as how People Can Fly is now owned by Epic. The game is bright, colorful, and vibrant. The character and weapon designs are well thought out and fit the universe perfectly, making for a really cohesive look. Things aren’t always perfect though, there is the occasional texture pop that is associated with Unreal Engine games and it can be really noticable at times. The sound effects are good, but the guns sound a little weaker than they look.

Everything is pretty much golden with the gameplay, so it really comes down to how the story turned out. Like I mentioned before, the game starts off rough. It feels overly serious and the writing isn’t great. Once you get into Act 2 things really turn around. One of my favorite dialogue exchanges in the game is when you meet up with a character named Trishka and she tells Grayson that she will “kill his dick off” and Grayson replies by asking what that even means. The game is filled with lots of really funny banter between characters, and even though there is a lot of immature dialogue in the game it hits often enough to make it work. To my surprise the story actually gets way better as the game goes on, and there is a strong motivation to see what is next.

I think that Bulletstorm is one of the most fun and inventive shooters I have played in a long while. It is a break from the seemingly never ending stream of modern day military shooters that come out now. Pretty much the whole time I was playing the game I just had a big, stupid grin on my face. If the early parts of the game were just a little bit tighter this would probably be the best shooter I have played in years, but it is still a game that shouldn’t be missed. As long as you push past the beginning you are in for a hell of a shooter, with a lot of things you haven’t seen before.

Score: 4/5 Stars

by Nicolas Perez

Here is the PS Move Spread

Thanks to UberExplodey from Giant Bomb for getting this to me and doing the actual layout and art.

Hey! I’m back!

Hey everyone, it’s Nick. I know that the blog has fallen into irrelevancy (as if it wasn’t irrelevant enough already) over the last few months. Let me provide a bit of back story as to what had happened. A while back the Giant Bomb community magazine, known as the Luchazine, was looking for some new writers. I applied and got excepted, I was pretty happy that my writing would get seen outside the scope of this blog. So I started writing for them, and I was really digging it. I wrote 2 pretty large articles for them in my first month there, the PS Move hardware and mini-reviews that are on here now and also the Castlevania review. I made sure everything was in by the deadlines the editor-in-chief had set and was good to go. For weeks after that, nothing happened. The articles were supposed to have been edited shortly after that and there was supposed to be a back and forth so that everything would be agreed upon. Now I don’t at all blame the editors for this, as a matter of fact I only really saw one guy ever editing the articles that were written for this thing. So finally after WEEKS of waiting, the art and editing was done for most of the articles and, even though it was set to come out a bit late, it looked like Issue 5 of the Luchazine was set to come out. The publish  date came and went and there was nary a word on our internal message board. Finally, the EIC comes in and says, “Well since it is gonna be so late, I am scrapping the issue and we are just gonna start fresh next month.”

I wasn’t aware that “starting fresh” entailed him wiping all the posts on the message board pertaining to that issue. I really wanted to post up the final draft art layouts for the Move and Castlevania articles, but I can’t access them at all anymore. Thank god I kept backups of the articles themselves or else it would have been a bigger waste of time than it already was. Already a bit miffed at the events that had taken place, I pressed on to the next issue. I was tasked with a Rock Band 3 review, once again I had it done far before deadline. The same situation with the last issue happened again, my article sat there waiting to be edited for weeks. Over the last few days things were looking good, articles were being edited and the art staff were doing really good. Then today I see the news that the EIC has decided to close the Luchazine.

From what it sounds like to me, the EIC mostly sounds like he is blaming the staff, here is a quote from his announcement post. “Whether you blame yourself, other members or even the two of us doesn’t matter at the end of the day. The fact is that instead of getting better, we’ve gotten much worse. At this point, you can’t say ‘oh we’ll do better next time’ because we’ve already had months and months of next time. Heck, some people just randomly disappeared from here without a single word.” Now from what I saw, most of the writers and art dudes met their deadlines and did the articles they were assigned. Later on in the thread he goes on to say that they wont even release the last issue. It seems really shitty to me to have 2 months of peoples time and hard work get thrown away because one guy doesn’t like it.

I was able to back up a near final spread of the Rock Band 3 review I did, the art was done by Aurahack who is a poster on Giant Bomb and a really talented member of the staff. I also want to give props to John Rabbit who worked on a really fantastic spread for Castlevania and UberExplodey who did an awesome job on a Playstation Move spread. I have gotten in contact with all of these dudes to try to get some of the spreads so I can post them up here. I also wanted to give a big thanks to Vito Raliffe who (as far as I can tell) had to edit EVERYONE’S articles by himself.

It is pretty crappy to waste people’s time for two months and then give them nothing to show for it, I hope that should I ever work on anything like this again that the people in charge will work a little harder to make sure that people’s work doesn’t go to waste.

Playstation Move Launch Game Breakdown

Tiger Woods 2011

Playing Tiger Woods 2011 with the Move feels a lot like playing it on the Wii using Motion Plus. It has the most shoddy motion detection of all the Move launch games I have played, mostly because it has a bit of trouble detecting when you are starting a swing. Move support is a cool addition for those who already own Tiger on PS3, but it feels like an after-thought; The Dualshock 3 is even required to navigate the menus. Even though nothing in particular is “broken” about the Move controls, it just feels half-assed all around.

Tumble

Tumble is very simple in its concept, it is a game mostly centered on manipulating blocks to build towers. The game feels like it may have started off as a tech demo for the Move, but you shouldn’t let that deter you. There are a multitude of levels, and each level has multiple goals in them to obtain different medals. I have never had more fun or been more stressed out stacking blocks before. If you are the proud owner of a new Move, I highly recommend checking out Tumble especially since it is only $10 on PSN.

The Shoot

From the outset it is obvious that The Shoot is nothing more than a simple light-gun shooter. The pointer is responsive and I had no problem triggering the gestures required to activate the different power-ups that you acquire during the game. The best part of The Shoot is its combo system. Getting multiple kills without missing raises the score multiplier, at times I had around a 60x multiplier and was racking up points. The game looks surprisingly good as well, and I like its unique approach of taking place on a movie set. I think this would have been better suited to be a PSN game

Start the Party

Start The Party is the closest thing to a Wii game in the Move launch line-up. At its heart it is a mini-game collection, but with the unique inclusion of augmented reality features. I have to admit it is quite funny to look at the screen and see yourself holding a big foam finger. The mini-games all seems fun and diverse enough to stay interesting for a while. If you have a lot of friends or family who are used to the Wii, Start The Party can be a great way to introduce them to the Move.

echochrome ii

Echocrome II is easily the biggest surprise for me out of the launch titles for Move. I am a fan of the first Echochrome and I had watched gameplay of this one, but it isn’t until you get your hands on it that it really clicks. The Move acts as a flashlight, which you use to make shadows that the main character can walk on. It is really hard to try and describe the game, and I recommend that anyone who likes puzzle games to try and get your hands on a Move demo disc and play the game yourself or at least check out some videos of it.

RE5 Move Edition

Have you played Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition? If so, then you have an exact idea of how Resident Evil 5 plays when using the Move. It takes a little time to adjust, but as soon as you do you will be blowing off Maiini heads with deadly precision. A quick shake of the remote will attack with the Knife, making it a lot faster to use. The Move controls breathe new life into the already great RE 5. Unfortunately, the Gold edition of RE 5 is required to use the new Move controls so it may require a re-purchase for normal edition owners.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playstation Move Hardware Breakdown

I am just going to come right out and say it, the Playstation Move is a fantastic piece of hardware. A lot of people have been skeptical of the technology since it was announced at the 2009 Sony E3 Press Conference. Since then a lot of hands on time with the device was with non-final versions of the device, but now the Move is finally available to the masses and is quite the knockout.

The key to getting the most out of the Move is properly setting up and calibrating the device. As some people know, the Move works in tandem with the Playstation Eye camera. This is why there is the somewhat silly looking orb on top of the Move controller; the camera sits above or below the TV and tracks the colored orb. This allows the camera to know the position of the Move in 3D Space.  Depending on the game, you will need to be anywhere from 3 to 8 feet away from the PS Eye for the Move to calibrate properly. This will definitely be a problem for those of you that have a tiny room where you will be setting up the Move. Provided that you have a large enough space, the Move should pose no problem to calibrate.

The hardware itself is really high quality, which is unsurprising seeing as how Sony is a hardware-focused company. The controller feels great in the hand and the buttons and trigger are all very responsive. It isn’t too light or too heavy, and the plastic has a nice matte finish that won’t show fingerprints.  It may also be a surprise to some people to know that the orb on the controller is squishy. My only real issue with the controller is with the position of the Start and Select buttons. They are located on the side of the controller and can be a real pain to access during gameplay.

When calibrated correctly, the Move works as advertised. The tracking is very precise and has never once lost track of it in the time I have used it so far. The only thing that hurts the Move is the amount of space required to use it.  Those who have a small room will need to so some furniture re-arrangement to use it, but it may be worth it to check out the Move.

 

Review: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow has an interesting story behind it. The game was announced as Lords of Shadow, but according to Konami it was actually a Castlevania game all along. They just didn’t want the announcement to compete with Castlevania Judgment, which was coming out around the time of the announcement. Not only that but the developer that worked on the game, MercurySteam, doesn’t exactly have a glowing track record. Their last game they worked on was the awful Clive Barker’s Jericho. Despite all odds, Castlevania: LoS is a solid game that gives the series a much-needed shot to the arm.

The story in Lords of Shadow is pretty basic to begin with. You play as Gabriel Belmont who is trying to stop the recent overflow of darkness around the world, and in the process also trying to bring back his wife Maria from the dead. There are a couple of good twists and turns throughout, even if they are somewhat predictable. The voice acting and cinematography in the cutscenes is excellent. There is also a surprising amount of known actors doing voices in the game, such as Sir Patrick Stewart who plays Zobek; another member of the Brotherhood of Light that Gabriel belongs to. The story is enough to keep you interested throughout the game and culminates in one of the most surprising after credits cutscenes I have ever seen.

The audio in the game is altogether really fantastic. The music in particular is really good, even if it isn’t very reminiscent of past Castlevania games. There are also a couple of little musical allusions to past Castlevania games. The only audio issue I had with the game was with NPC dialogue. There were multiple times in the game where an NPC would repeat the same lines over and over. Most of the time they would repeat lines meant to help guide the player. For about ten to fifteen minutes I heard the line “Gabriel, we still need to find 3 more crystal shards!” repeated about every 45 seconds. The developer should have had a little more faith in players to remember what they are supposed to be doing instead of repeating it to them ad nauseum.

Visually the game is stunning. At times the graphics seemed on par with a game such as Uncharted 2, but the cost for this beauty is a very inconsistent frame rate. It seems like the frame rate was left uncapped, so at times it will reach sixty frames per second only to drop to thirty or less FPS within seconds. This is an especially jarring problem when performing any sort of quick time event that requires precision timing. I never felt that the drops made the game unplayable in any way, but it is an issue that people should be aware of going in. I want to make special mention of the character designs in the game. There are a lot of really interesting designs and they are all really well thought out and look coherent within the universe of the game.

Where Lords of Shadow makes it’s biggest misstep is in the pacing of the game. The genre of the game is a character action, very much styled after God of War or Ninja Gaiden. The combat is really good and the controls felt great. The problem is that the game just goes on far longer than it should. It will probably take an average player about 10-16 hours to finish the game rushing through it, even longer to go after all the collectibles. The game just follows the same formula throughout, usually a combat section followed by some environment traversal or a puzzle. There just isn’t enough variety to hold your attention as long as they are asking you to. The game is divided into twelve chapters and even though the last three or four are really fantastic it will take some real willpower to make it to them.

Lords of Shadow is really close to being an amazing game. It has everything you want from a good character action game: a good upgrade system, really responsive controls, and a lot of depth in the combat system. The game just hurts itself by being too long. Even though it isn’t a perfect game I am still think that it is an excellent first try for MercurySteam and it is a long overdue reinvigoration for the Castlevania series.

Pros:

+ Well told story

+ Really fantastic audio/visual experience

+ Solid Combat

Cons:

-       Game just goes on for too long

-       Framerate can be distracting

-       Repeating audio will drive you nuts

Score: 4/5 stars

Review: Rock Band 3

So this spread was supposed to be used in the poorly managed Giant Bomb Community Magazine, The Luchazine. But it didn’t work out, so here it is for your viewing pleasure. The art was done by Giant Bomb user Aurahack.

First Impressions: OnLive

OnLive has been talked up for quite a while, and sounds like something that shouldn’t work. Playing games located somewhere in the “cloud” with minimal controller lag sounds like crazy future talk, but OnLive DOES work there are just a few more caveats than you would want. My first boot into OnLive didn’t leave me with great feelings. I downloaded the app onto my iMac and started it up, it gave me a warning message saying that my network was a bit more latent than the service would of liked. It still let me continue on and got me to the OnLive dashboard. About 30 seconds later it disconnected me, and for the rest of the day I couldn’t connect because my ISP caps speed during peak hours and even at full speed our internet package (5Mbps) just barely meets minimum requirements for OnLive. Not only that but the software requires a wired connection right now so I had to run a cable from my iMac to my Powerline adapter.

So I waited until midnight, when my ISP uncaps the internet again and gave it another shot. Finally I was able to connect and actually play some games. There aren’t a ton of games on the service at the moment, but they are all pretty good games. The first one I checked out (to OnLive’s credit they offer a 30 min demo for most of the games) was Splinter Cell Conviction. I clicked the button and the game started up almost immediately. Like the warning message had said, I definitely felt some lag in the controls but not enough that the game became unplayable. My first thought was “This kinda looks like I am playing a game on YouTube” but like I said my internet isn’t the best in the world. But I still managed to be impressed. Here I was playing Splinter Cell Conviction on an iMac that wasn’t running the game locally at all. Not only that, but at some point a OnLive window popped up in the corner notifying me that someone was watching me play and was watching the exact same stream as the one I was playing. My mind was slightly blown.

I tried out a couple of other games and they all played with similar results. I got a coupon for a free game so I bought the new Prince of Persia game through the service. Once again, as soon as I got the game all I did was hit the play button and I was playing it right away. I got the feeling that playing Prince of Persia was not going to be optimal when playing it through OnLive simply because PoP is such a timing based platformer. But I was easily able to compensate for the slight lag and I totally played through the first level of the game without too many issues. Another cool thing about the service is something they call “Brag Clips”. Since all the service it doing is feeding you a video stream, this allows them to cache the last 10 seconds of gameplay. At one point the Prince did a really cool finishing move on an enemy, I hit Alt+B and the last 10 seconds were saved and added to my profile where anyone can watch it.

Really the biggest issue with OnLive is all the restrictions. Requiring a very particular internet speed and a wired connection is quite a barrier to entry. But in the time I spent playing games on the service I was impressed with what I was seeing. I just wished it worked with less hassle.

P.S. I am planning on taking some screenshots soon so you can see what I mean by saying “Looks like I am playing a YouTube video”

Review: Alan Wake

Alan Wake was I game that I didn’t think would ever come out. After such a long time where nothing was said about the game I was fairly certain that the project was dead. But finally Alan Wake has graced my 360 DVD drive, and the result is a game with an amazing, gripping story and some solid action gameplay.

The story of Alan Wake revolves around Alan going with his wife to a small northwestern town named Bright Falls. Things quickly take a turn for the worse and Wake’s wife disappears and a dark presence appears in the town. The story is well thought out and takes plenty of twists and turns. Easily the best thing about the story is the episodic structure in which the story is told. Each “episode” ends with a cliffhanger just like any good mystery series and the game makes clever use of some licensed music between episodes. My biggest issue with the story is that once you get into the last two episodes of the game, the story starts to feel rushed and the pacing of the episodes break down.

Remedy has always been known for making really good action games so it is no surprise that Alan Wake’s action is fast and fluid. The game uses some interesting mechanics with light, all of the enemies in the game are shrouded in darkness which must be burned off using Wake’s flashlight. Only then can they be harmed using regular weapons. Because of this flares and flash bangs become the weapons of choice for big crowds. Earlier I mentioned that the games pacing goes a bit wonky near the end of the game. Early in the game the combat and story segments are very well broken up and you aren’t left doing one or the other too much to get bored of it. Unfortunately, late in the game it feels like they had to rush through things and the combat portions become way too strung out. I think Brad Shoemaker from Giant Bomb said it best when he mentioned that by the end of the game he had as much of the combat as he needed.

Graphically the game is a total knockout. The amount of lighting and particle effects thrown on screen at once is astounding. The atmosphere in the game is fantastic, the feeling of dread as you go through the dense forest is second to none. My personal favorite effect in the game is when the wind starts to kick up, a usual sign of incoming danger, and fog starts to blow around and cloud your view. It is really a sight to behold. The sound in the game is also fantastic and helps to pull you into the world.

Overall, the only thing that really keeps Alan Wake from being one of the best games around is the sloppy pacing near the end. The story had a very steady build up, but then it had a lot to explain and not enough time to explain it. My hope is that the upcoming DLC will expand more on the plot points they had to rush through in the end, but I still think that most people should definitely check out the game, it is an awesome experience through and through.