I've found myself, from time to time, with a slight urge to play a survival horror, only to realise that the game is too bleeding scary for me to play without tripling my weekly expenditure at my local dry cleaners. It takes a good horror game to keep me pinned playing. Enter: Alone in the Dark (queue powerful music).
I bought this game months ago, but didn't pick it up until Sunday. It came in a lovely little box with a figure of the main character, Eddy, a
Making of Bonus DVD, an art book and the music score in CD form. Even if the game turns out to be a waste of my hard earned money, then I have a fancy box and ornament to remind me it's not all that bad.
Alone is cinematic from the start. A-la Metal Gear Solid, you get to look through the players eyes see what's going on. Blinking clears your vision which annoying keeps blurring up. This lasts a while, but is a nice effect to a point. As soon as the first nameless thug inevitabley gets eaten by a moving crack, you're given the freedom to progress alone, using various obsticals and events as
on the fly tutorials. Okay, the controls are absolutely a pain in the backside when you first start, but this is very much like riding a bike (in the way that as soon as you think you can ride, you go crashing into a wall unexpectedly wishing you could try again with more wisdom). This gets easier with time though, and the loading times are very fast.
Graphically, this game is'nt excellently detailed, but makes up for this with it's realism when producing fire. Possibly the best fire effects I have ever seen, so much that I put them out as little as possible, unless this hinders my progress. Unfortunately the Havok Engine has been somewhat...tweaked... I remember playing Painkiller and remembering how fantastic gravity pulled onto things, with a very realistic atmosphere when something was falling. Unfortunately this no longer applies, especially when you walk over a corpse and he flies a mile. Thankfully this is something you can ignore, until you hotwire your first car and try to make some zombie roadkill, then realising that the car goes straight through the zombie and he ends up on top of your car, hitting you!
The level design is great and new. Alone, is very much like watching a DVD. As soon as you start the game, you have a choice to skip to any scene of any chapter you like. That means if you get stuck, you can skip to the next part. This isn't something I'd use myself but a very cinematic touch. The layout is great and keeps me keen. The game is very open once you get to Central Park though. Very big and free.
Puzzles are very physics based. You can open doors by finding keys, bashing through them with a fire extignuisher, or simply shooting the lock. There's also the ability to comine items to get to where you want, such as pouring flammable oil on your bullets to make them firey (which comes in handy when you realise that fire is the only thing that can kill your enemy). Find the necessary tools and you can make anything from flamethrowers to bouncing Molotovs.
The music is something really special. A Bulgarian choir have collabarated with Eden for this score, and it has a real Hollywood feel to it, if not better. It truly is epic, and makes the game that much more playable.
The game is a fantastic acheivement for the France based Eden Games. It has a very solid story, which does not require any previous knowledge to the series. It looks beautiful and if you can get past the floors (the few which are) you can easily get a brilliant game experience out of this. This is one of the few survival horrors which I am not able to put down. If horror, action and story are your thing, I don't think you'll be dissapointed.
GRAPHICS - B
SOUND - A+
GAMEPLAY - A
REPLAYABILITY - B+
Images Courtesy of Teamxbox.com
