Alone in the Dark Review (Xbox 360)

Posted By Joe Haygood

Alone in the Dark is suppose to be a return to glory for a game long forgotten. It is also suppose to be a game that returns fortune to Atari’s somewhat tarnished brand. The Alone in the Dark franchise has sat for some time now, its last outing coming in the form of a horrible movie, directed by Uwe Boll. Atari has put a lot of work into reviving this franchise, to the point of making it a flagship release for the company. While it delivers on providing an enjoyable, mature storyline, the game’s mechanics get in the way at every turn, giving the player more frustration than enjoyment.

Alone in the Dark starts off by setting up the mood perfectly, with you coming out of a drug induced sleep, captured by some people that want a stone medallion. While attempting to find the stone, you friend Theophile Paddington releases the evil that is in the stone to free your character, Edward Carnby from its influence. With that one moment, the demons of hell break out of their containment in the stone and release their fury on the human populace of Earth. Quickly, you are delivered into the action and the chase to find out who you are and how you can stop the apocalypse that has fallen upon New York City.

While the story sounds clichéd and rehashed, Alone in the Dark really does do a wonderful job of giving the player bits and pieces of information, slowly weaving them into an elaborate and entertaining tale. Everything from finding out who you really are, to your connection with the chaos that has ensnared New York are told with lots of suspense and a surprising sense of maturity. The story feels like a really good R-Rated drama, although the language does get a bit blue at times. I am all for the work fuck on several occasions, but it might have beaten the record set by Scarface with as many times as it is used here. As I was playing through Alone in the Dark, I realized that the story felt like a really good novel that just captures you, and makes you want to finish reading it in one shot.

Of course, story only carries you so far, and then you have to look at the mechanics of the game, and here is where the train comes off the rails for Alone in the Dark. To learn all the controls that you will have to use in Alone in the Dark will take a thesis in game design. Just know that when you open the manual to Alone in the Dark, you are greeted with four pages of controls for your character. Yes, four pages of controls, for a 12 button controller. You have control sets for moving, for healing, for inventory and even for driving. You get lost in the mechanics of Alone in the Dark, because it is constantly throwing some sort of enemy at you. Nothing can be more irritating than having to control your blinking when you get hit with something in the eyes, while you are knee deep in combat with a bunch of bad guys. Yeah, there is a control for blinking your eyes voluntarily, and it just adds to the list of controls that could have been removed from this game. Driving segments also kill the game due to horrendous control issues and a car that drives like it is on an ice flow. You never have any good sense of control, and again, another segment that is in Alone in the Dark, that could have been removed without hurting the overall approach to the game

When you look at Alone in the Dark you get the feel that two or three teams worked on the game, because it is a graphical hodge-podge of good and bad. While Edward Carnby looks really good, having lots of detail, the other characters you encounter feel a little too smooth and lacking detail. Some of the human zombies, or Humanz as the game calls them, are very similar, with about four to five body types in all. The enemy types are varied with at least 6 to 8 different types of things attacking you from Batz to huge needle shooting monsters, each with their own characteristics. However, they too, feel a little too smooth and without detail. Environments are a mixed bag as well. Building design is very well done, with lots of detail, and each looking quite different from the next. But when you enter the open environments, they just feel a bit too plain and generic, repeating themselves constantly. Alone in the Dark takes place in a park setting, but it just feels like several texture maps were created and then mapped over a topo map.

While puzzles have been a staple of the Alone in the Dark series, they take a big back seat this time around. There are a few puzzles here and there, but mostly, they are environmental puzzles, like trying to figure out how to open a fingerprint door (quite amusing as to the solution), or getting some flame on a nest of bad guys, but the nest is behind a gate. These puzzles are never taxing on the brain, and most are solved within minutes, which really will disappoint long time fans of the series.

The main draw that everyone read about in the magazines and saw in the trailers for Alone in the Dark is its fire effects. The fire in Alone in the Dark, acts very naturally, and interacts with the environment whenever possible. You will need to use fire on occasion to solve puzzles, like making a trail of flammable liquid that you can light, or for opening a passage to another part of the level. The fire is very cool to watch, but a pain to work around when you get trapped in a tight spot with bad guys, and it kills you very quickly. That said, Alone in the Dark does make fire your number one weapon, ranging from firebombs and furniture on fire all the way down to fire bullets. Yep, in Alone in the Dark, you can pour some flammable liquid on your bullets to add some fiery spice to every shot from your weapon.

So where does Alone in the Dark stand? The story line is top notch and well written, with competent actors filling in all the roles and giving strong performances. It is everything I could ask for in a quality mature thriller, but the story is taking a back seat to the controls. You never feel like you are in control of Alone in the Dark, but more like you are fighting it. Taking out some segments like driving and minimizing the controls and you would have a top notch game. As it stands Alone in the Dark gets a 2 out of 5