Alone in the Dark Review

Alone in the Dark is one of those survival horror classics from the old days. It had a few titles on PlayStation and some other systems. Well now we are on what would be the next chapter in the series and apparently this one takes place after the first one where you are following drowsy Edward Carnby,who is the main character. Your main environment is New York's Central Park which you explore and pretty much spend the whole game in. You are basically trying to figure out your past and what is going on through out the majority of the game until you figure out you are actually from the 1920's and somehow are in our time period. You now must figure things out and find out what is happening to New York in general with everything falling apart and craters popping up all over the place and destroying things. This sounds like a cool story, unfortunately playing in this world is an abomination. So yes, the controls are bad, sometime very bad. The movements are very twitchy and it feels as if your character is just a on a delay sometimes or just wont move they way you want him to at all. The camera is fixed and becomes a big pain in the ass in a lot of areas causing you of course to die. Along with the movement controls the driving areas are the worst part about this game. With the game penalizing you for driving over a jump to fast or making a jump or turn to only randomly slip the car or have it get wedged/stuck in a crevice and then get killed. The driving courses are usually linear but with things happening all around you you will probably have to do some of these driving sequences a few times to learn the pattern, if you wan to that is. Yes this game actually comes with a level selector right at the beginning. It allows you as a player to skip an area you find to difficult and move on to not worry about that chapter you just need a certain number of them to go to the last level. This was a good idea for people who want to skip areas they find difficult and what not, but also seems like something put in due to some broken things with the game itself. Minus having a few other problems with a pop in problem and the physics sometimes being way to sensitive the game itself has got some very unique ideas to it. The menu system having an open jacket inventory and such made it very cool having to like open your jacket and pull your gun and stuff. The creative stuff with the combination of the different types of items was also kind of cool making a stick bomb to use on baddies was cool with tape and a bottle of gas. Also being able to throw the items and get a slowdown to only shoot it to have it spray flames over an area to burn fools. you also can go into a first person mode to heal yourself as well as to shoot your gun which has an semi auto-lock on feature. I liked the healing aspect,how I would use the first aid spray to focus on an area hurt and spray it down and heal it as well as use bandages to heal major wounds which you had a time limit to heal before you'd pass out and die. The enemies themselves were not to great with having the zombie/undead humans who you had to set on fire in order to kill to the crab like enemies who act like the head crabs from half-life as well as a bat-like creature. The enemies feel recycled from various other games and just are not that interesting. The fissure is probably the only enemy I thought was really cool which drug you around on the ground and you had to pull yourself out or grab something other than that nothing seemed very inventive. While these tried to helped bring the series out of the shadows a little bit but not enough for you to lay down that hard earn cash. So while they tried to add a few new things to the game they still had alot of problems and for a game I was really looking forward too I wish they spent a little more time fixing some of the problems the game has. Despite having some control issues and some other hiccups the game itself is not that bad but not one that is a must buy.

Overall - D