Alan Wake 2’s DLC Fails To Improve The Base Game’s Shallow Gameplay

The only critique that I had with Alan Wake 2 at release was its gameplay system. Remedy changed genres for this sequel and it ended up resulting in a game that felt less fun to play than the original. A lot of animations feel jankier and some of the returning mechanics from Alan Wake 1 feel less smooth overall. The DLC has failed to turn the tables in the gameplay department and issues still plague Alan Wake 2.

The Sequel Is Actually inferior In Terms Of Gameplay

Alan Wake 2 nails almost every aspect of story-telling, visual presentation, and OST but its gameplay is actually something that feels less fun than the Alan Wake 1. I know that the game is testing a different genre which is actually the first experiment of a survival horror game from Remedy. But the gameplay just doesn’t hit like other great survival horrors like Resident Evil 2.

Alan Wake 2's gameplay is significantly worse than Alan Wake 1's
byu/Sleepykitti inunpopularopinion

There’s this jank in the dodging animation in this game which makes it not only look worse visually but also does not feel satisfying like it did in Alan Wake 1. The same can be said for shooting, the guns literally lack that weight and recoil while you’re raining down bullets. There’s not enough weapon variety either which doesn’t help the already unsatisfying gameplay system.

The flashlight mechanic is a staple for the Alan Wake franchise and I don’t like how this mechanic is implemented in Alan Wake 2. In the first game, you could hold down the flashlight on enemies until the entire battery bar would run out but in Alan Wake 2 that bar has been differentiated into charges. This not only leads to more wastage of your battery resources if you misaim but it also, again, becomes unsatisfying to use.

There’s Nearly Not Enough Enemy Variety

The enemy variety problem-plagued even the first Alan Wake and you would expect Remedy to come up with a solution in the sequel, however, that does not seem to be the case. There were only around 2 new enemy types that I only found in Saga’s playthrough and they weren’t even present in Alan’s part of the story which was filled with the same and repeated enemies.

Critique: The combat in Alan Wake 2 is inferior to the first game.
byu/BigDumbSmartGuy inAlanWake

I know that survival horror games mostly don’t feature enough enemy variety, but as an Alan Wake 1 fan, I was expecting to see something new in the sequel. As for the boss fights, Alan’s playthrough almost completely lacked those, but instead featured some huge set pieces. Thankfully, there were boss fights present at the end of each chapter in Saga’s section which kept things from getting too repetitive gameplay-wise.

There’s a lot of clunkiness that is felt not only in movement but also in the basic mechanics like movement, dodging, shooting, and even how the flashlight is used. Even though Alan Wake 1 was more action-oriented, its gameplay felt a lot smoother. I had hopes for the Night Springs DLC to improve or innovate on the gameplay system of Alan Wake 2 but alas, the problem still persists even in the DLC.

Remedy did craft a survival horror but it failed to deliver on some basic mechanics that such games feature. Take resource management for example, this mechanic is something that makes or breaks a survival horror. Such games always provide a short amount of healing items, ammunition, etc to the player and put them in a horror-intensified environment filled with deadly monsters where they have to survive with the minimum resources.

alan wake 2 is a bad survival horror game
byu/dukeexma insurvivalhorror

You can almost never engage and kill all enemies in a specific area because you would run out of resources before reaching the boss. However, in Alan Wake 2 I was almost never short on resources, items were present in surplus amounts, so much so that even my storage was always filled with items in addition to my inventory.

It never felt like a survival game to me as I was killing almost every enemy in my path and never ran out of ammo or heals. I almost feel like Alan Wake 2 would’ve had a much better gameplay system if it stuck to the action genre as the developers have sacrificed the smooth combat of Alan Wake 1 to create a survival horror sequel.