My Fiancée, being an absolute star, bought me Alan Wake on the Xbox 360 last week.

This game had been on my radar for a while as I’m a huge horror film / Stephen King fan and the trailers on YouTube made it look like a mixture of a King novel with a X-files episode.

From the very beginning the game is all about the story and with the main character being a writer it only confirmed my Stephen King theory. Hell, in the very first line that comes out of the main character mouth he mentioned King’s name. If Alan had been hit by an out of control van in the first 30 seconds I would of even thought King was on the writing staff.

Anyway about the game:

Alan Wake is having what can only be called a major creative burn out. So decides to take a holiday to Bright Falls with his wife, Alice. Unknown to Alan, Alice has set up a meeting with a local Doctor to help him through his writing block. This leads to a heated exchange between the couple and Alan walks out leaving Alice alone.

Next thing you know there’s a scream and Alice has been taken by an unknown dark entity. Alan jumps into a lake after seeing Alice under the water and the next thing he knows he wakes up sitting in his wrecked car with seven days missing with no memory of what’s happened.

The dark entity has started to possess some of the locals towns folk who attack Alan on his unavoidable woodland walks. Using handy torches, which have been left around Bright Falls like there was an explosion in a nearby torch factory. Alan can burn off the Darkness which surrounds and protects the attackers by focused the beam of the torch. Then using the handy assortment of guns, apparently the local gun shop exploded as well, he can plug them with a few holes to make them evaporate into the air like ash on the wind.

This game is all about story, but coming from Remedy, who made the brilliant noire games Max Pain 1 & 2, you know they were going to get the story and theme right.

Good Points

• Theme – Dark and moody. Lovely!
• Story – Plenty of it! Nice!
• Effects – The torch light is brilliant and the mist around the trees really has you jumping at bushes. Excellent!
• Character – There is some great comic relief from Barry. Whoop! Whoop!

This is a brilliant game and I enjoyed it………but there were a few downsides to the game.

• Its short – I completed the game in a couple of sittings giving about 10 hours of play and I’m crap at gaming.
• The ending – Its a cliff hanger and there are already two DLC’s for it. Lucky my game case contained a voucher to let me have the first DLC for free.
• The faces – Not the best facial models ever.
• Woods – The main theme of this game is that if you go into the woods at night guess what? Your going to get your ass handed to you by a axe wielding maniac. Can you keep Alan out of the woods? NO…..he’s like a friggin tree magnet and at the drop of a hat he’s off hiking in the foot hills AGAIN!

Even with these bad points I still recommend that you play the game. Also its been out a while so Amazon has it quite cheap at the moment. Go on, treat yourself.

So, I have done it, finally completed a game on the xbox! Much to the boyfs dismay. Hey even he has yet to complete a game. And I mean complete, 100%, all achevements complete! I really enjoyed it and seeing as it is the only game I have owned on the xbox it can only be a good thing. The lego games have always been fun with a quirky sense of humor. Star Wars was the first I played. The great thing is they appeal to your inner vandle, just smash everything and grab loads of studs. My kinda game. The cut scenes are great to, as an avid fan of the Harry Potter books and films it was great to see a different and fun take on them. Well J. K. Rowling did go all deep and depressing by the end.

The game may have been fun overall, but boy was it a pain in the arse at the same time. To get 100% and all the achievements I played it through a total of 5 times! Well, the first time I played it through to get to the end of the story, then I went back and played it through to get all the bits and pieces. All the studs for True Wizard, the Students in Peril and the House Crests. All was going fine until I realised I was missing a level. Yes I had made the mistake of getting fustrated with the Tom Riddles Diary level and just turining off the Xbox as lunch was ready anyways. Uh-Oh Spaghetti-os! Yep, I found my first majour glitch in the game. I could no longer access that level to complete the game 100%

So cue the second play through on a new saved file. I was a little bored this time. I also got really fustrated. Harry Potter as a franchise is aimed at kids right? So why were some of the levels so friggin’ difficult! I mean well hard, surly no kid would have worked it out. Mind you when I did fugure it out I felt like such an idiot for not noticing the obvious!

So but this time I had all the red boxes, so I had the cheats turned on in order to find the other bits and pieces. Cue another glitch with a massive hunt for a gold brick that never existed in the Restricted section of the library. Yep, at this point I gave up and broke out the laptop. I sat with a walkthrough guide next to me. To be honest I got 95% of it on my own, but I would have been wandering around Hogwarts Castle for hours without that walk through. Again, somethings are only obvious when pointed out. In Knockturn Alley there was a character token really high up. I had worked out the cart underneath would buck, but I could not get it to buck when I was on it. Then the obvious, dont just mash the keypad to set off spells which dont hit the cart, you can aim the spell at the cart to make it buck. Duh, felt an idiot after that one! Also, I was hitting pictures all over the place but didnt realise I had to keep hitting the quiddich players ones. There I was trying to get a dog on the very top floor to give up his bone thinking that would lead me to a gold brick!  Thank goodness there are other gamers with more brains than me and willing to share them!

It was great to walk round the castle though, the Herbology Greenhouses with lego eating plants, flying on broomsticks, exploring the dormatories, the students doing strange things in the background. Honestly I didnt know which were in peril or which were twits!

I even managed to get into the room below the charms class with the dragon, and, wait for it, get back out again!!!!! Another major glitch. In fact after the first glitch I had read up on them and did this room as soon as possible with the new save just in case I buggered it up again. You see most people don’t get back out of that room. Very frustrating. Even more so is that the game makers know of the glitch and are not doing anything about it for the Xbox, they did for the PS3, gits!

So all in all I really enjoyed the game, got a little obsessive over it and hey went about killing every one as Voldemort as you do! I am well proud of my gamer points and am slowly catching up to the boyf!