June 23, 2008 at 2:35PM Quick review: “Alone in the Dark” for the Wii
Oh, dear. I’d such high hopes for this. I’m not saying it’s a bad game; it’s not. But it falls far short of the game it could have been.
First of all, let’s start with the things I’m not too bothered about. Sure, the graphics aren’t exactly the best. I’d go so far as to say its looks to be only slightly more sophisticated than those used in PC games around about 2002. Far Cry this is not. One of the worst bits of graphics in it was the effluent animation when you’re down in the sewer, and I think they really could have put more effort into making the lipsync look more realistic. The textures used were much more flat and bland than they could have been.
The physics are good, but I get the feeling that they could have exploited the Havok engine so much more than they did, and in doing so make the canned sequences far less annoyingly repetitive. The best piece of physics in it is probably the rope swinging you have to do occasionally, which works brilliantly, even if the level design makes this annoyingly finnicky in places. The movement of the main character is, um, a bit odd in places, with him suddenly being displaced a half a foot so that he can climb something rather than having a fluid movement into position.
Which brings me on to the initial two episodes of the game. While I know that to a degree these were meant to act as trainers, in places it was far from obvious what to do. The most frustrating of these for me was one place where the player has to position a table to get out of a room with a partially collapsed floor. Maybe it’s that they were expecting it to be played on a TV with 4:3 ratio rather than 16:9, but I only managed to find the place where you can climb up by accident.
The save system is annoying because, well, it doesn’t really do much. You see, each episode is broken up into sections, each of which starts with a save point. However, you’re also able to save from the game menu, which doesn’t make it obvious where you’re saving your game from. I found this particularly annoying once I managed to get outside the burning building for first time. I was only getting used to the controls, and some of the physics puzzles in that section are tricky unless you’ve got the hang of them. It’s not nice being almost at the end of a section, then dying and being thrown back to the start again.
The controls are a mixed bag. For the most part, they work quite well, but fall down due to inconsistency. Getting into the inventory system is one of these. The gesture for opening it works well, but if you’re wielding the gun at the same time, you’re blocked from opening it and instead Edward will pop the clip to show you how many bullets you’ve left. Now, while I appreciate that this means that the game doesn’t require a distracting HUD, I’d gladly have accepted that in exchange for getting rid of the fiddliness of the controls. The on-screen hints compensate for a lot of the control system’s weaknesses, but they’re essentially deoderant, and their presence indicates that the developers got a bit lazy after they’d their initial ideas and just gave up on getting their execution right.
The acting’s quite good, but can get a bit irritating due to the positioning of some of the cut scenes. It tries to do the whole Half-Life thing by mixing some of the cutscenes into the gameplay, but annoyingly freezes the controls so you can’t do anything. This completely misses the point. Whoever had that dumb idea should be slapped about the head repeatedly.
In parts of the levels, there’s poorly designed barriers. One that sticks in my mind is the exit of the underground parking lot. The exit is open, but there’s flames everywhere, so you have to use an extinguisher to put them out. And that’s the problem: there’s an invisible barrier right at the exit and, in spite of having a fire extinguisher, you can’t go any further. If there was a door here, it would have been understandable, but this immediately broke my immersion in the game world. Again, the level designer deserves a slap.
The camera, oh the camera. Seriously, if you allow switching perspectives, it should be possible to do so everywhere, not just where it suits the level designer. There are parts of the game where the camera is locked and the player inexplicably is unable to change perspective. This did my head in.
The combat system, which takes a wee while to get used to initially, is great. It makes rather good use of the motion sensors in the Wii Remote and once you get used to locking on to a bad guy, it’s simple and natural.
The NPCs are annoyingly dumb. They stand around impassively doing nothing like manniquins and then suddenly spring to life. If they’d at least strode around like they were caught up in their own little world or interacted with the player a little, I might have actually cared about them, but I couldn’t. At best they tended to be annoying automatons. It’s bad when the zombies have more life in them than the humans!
The above-ground driving section was dumb. It was like something you’d have found in a game ten years ago. Maybe I’m spoiled by the GTA games, but if you’re going to do something like this, at least make it interesting. This would have been better as a cut scene or something.
One nice thing about its episodic structure is that the later sections are all there to play initially without having to first complete them. Of course, there’s a certain spoiler factor involved, but if you’re that impatient to play the very last section, that’s your choice.
But for all its flaws and annoyances, it’s still a good game, even if it falls short of how good it could have been. Maybe it’s because it was caught in development hell, maybe it’s because Atari/Infogrammes didn’t put enough time into proper playtesting or ignored what their playtesters were telling them, but it could’ve been so, so much better.
7/10, and but if they’d fixed the flaws I’ve noted above, it could easily have been a 9/10. I’ve yet to finish the game as I’ve only played it for seven hours or so, so I’m guessing there’s about fourteen or fifteen hours of gameplay in it, making it a wee bit short. The game gets better as it goes on, I must admit, so when I’m finished I’ll post up a short review of the rest of the game.
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