The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary: [6 out of 10]

Alone in the Dark is a collection of excellent ideas, none of them quite polished to completion and all put together in a relatively ho-hum story resulting in a rough-edged title that can sometimes be a lot of fun to play and sometimes drive you mad.

Overview

This is a action survival game that take place in New York, more specifically Central Park. You are playing as Edward Carnby a paranormal investigator, the star of the original Alone in the dark from 1992. You start the game awakening from an unconscious state, to be taken to the roof top to be executed by order of Crowley, your adversary throughout the game.

You almost instantly come to your first meeting with the “living scars” or cracks that can move across most surfaces and eat anyone nearby turning them into zombies. You eventually meet up with Sarah, who teams up with you becoming your ally throughout the game.

Your quest is to stay alive, whilst plowing zombies down in your car, shooting demonic bats,  facing off with the living scars, or completing puzzle sequences to continue.

The basis of the story is structured around you finding out who you are, where all this evil is coming from and obviously how to stop it.

Gameplay and Controls

When this game previewed at the Leipzig Game conference,  they showed off a pretty cool game inventory system. Inside your jacket you keep items in pockets, and have the ability to combine items. For example you could combine a tape and a glow stick and stick it to the wall, or my personal favorite pour flammable liquid over your bullets to create flaming bullets.

As sweet as this sounds it felt very unfinished, switching between item in your jacket is a little bit cumbersome and one annoying part was the fact that when you were in your jacket combining items, the zombie onslaught continues; the game doesn’t pause.

Another feature is the option of choosing between 1st and 3rd person views, this was this biggest point of my contention with this game that ruined moment after moment of gameplay for me.

The 3rd person view is VERY clumsy, and found my self using 1st person the most. However some scenarios require you to be in 3rd person, or you might enter a sequence that boots you to 3rd, but doesn’t auto return you to 1st.

I found myself getting so frustrated at the controls, oh did i mention there are 4 pages in the manual for player controls alone? 4 freaking pages… that seems like a red-flag to me right there.

DVD like game play was another feature that this game offers. Essentially the game is broken into 8 episodes, and 8 or so chapters in each episode. The box Boast “Never Get Stuck game play”

After playing this through the first episode, I quickly found out why that this was not so much a feature but a necessity. I had to resist the urge to use this many times, because I frequently found myself standing in a room thinking, what now? Unfortunately, most times, 10 more mins of walking around and staring at walls lead to no obvious conclusion. There were a few points where I was completely baffled and just had to skip the chapter.

The game play felt very unfinished, it felt as though some great ideas were given to some brand-new game designers to execute and with the lack of experience they put the game together as best they could, but left a lot of rough edges in the process. It’s to bad too, because a lot of the ideas in this game had great potential.

Graphics

The graphics of this game are fairly good, no scene in particular made me go “WOW! that looks good”, however the fire was pretty impressive… not just how it looked, but the physics of it. It was a good thing too because there is fire all over the place in this title. The physical modeling of fire burning different materials was equally as impressive; like burning a door and watching it crumble as the wood chars.

The were some nice physics in the game, for example using a fire extinguisher to pound open a door would bend it and eventually break the wood of the door.

Music and Sound

The music soundtrack was produced by Oliver Deriviere and backed by “The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices”. The eery music added to the ambiance of the game nicely, you can check out a track here: Alone in the dark - Prelude to an end

Conclusion [6 out of 10]

Overall Alone in the Dark could have fairly easily been a better/much-better game if the gameplay aspects (like controls, perspective shifts, puzzles, etc.) had been refined. The engine that drove the game brought enough technical prowess to the table to be impressive on it’s own (e.g. fire) but that wasn’t where the game fell short.

We’ll be very curious to see how the PS3 release of this game ends up in November of this year and if it includes corrections/enhancements for the short-comings the Xbox 360 release that was reviewed here suffered from.

Areas of Improvement

As with our other game reviews, we try not to knock a game down unless we can suggest how it could have been better, so here we go:

• Changing Perspectives - This ruined a lot of the game sequences, constantly having the game force you out of a 1st person perspective and into a 3rd person perspective.
• Controls - The controls felt sluggish and unrefined, the gameplay would feel much better to have this tweaked.
• Path Control - The game would be more enjoyable if either the story line was a little more on rails, or if there was time delay hint given.
• Inventory Management - Simplifying this a hair would have helped and also pausing the action of the game. I understand “survival horror” but punishing the player by keeping the game rolling when they go into their inventory really sucked in some tighter spots.
• TLC - Spending time tightening all the loose ends with the game world environment, fixing bugs and play-testing to discover the complaints we had most other reviewers had as well.

Update #1: Looks like Atari has heard everyone’s cries and will be releasing a patch for the Xbox 360 Alone in the Dark version that improves the inventory management and the camera control; also worth noting is the comment that it’s already part of the PS3 version of the game.