For the Love of Bad Games

I have a confession to make, for the past week or so I've been playing the new widely panned "Alone in the Dark" game on the x360 and found myself enjoying it. Now a lot of people (most notably Yahtzee and Spoony as well as much of the more conventional gaming journos) have been somewhat negative about the game. A lot of people take the view that if it had been given just a little more polish it could have been brilliant as it is it's somewhat niche appeal. Atari haven't helped reviews by threatening to sue a few of the sites with poor reviews on the grounds their reviews were so early they must have used illegal copies of the game. Whether the sites did this or not is by the by as that sort of activity doesn't make people see things in a better light.

I picked it up when I was browsing the bargain bins in game along with timeshift (a lackluster fps with a time stop gimick) and Conan (a hack and slash button masher game) all for around a tenner new. It is a guilty pleasure picking up abandoned titles like that which the retail chains are trying to shift by lowering the price then extracting what pleasure can be had for low costs. In the case of Alone in the Dark it was barely a week old.

Alone in the Dark follows on from the long running series of the same name that was the originator of the survival horror genre in games. Alone in the Dark was the first and after a few fairly unimpressive sequels this new title was the big hope to re-establish the franchise as the name in the field.

The game is a action adventure with some 3rd and first person action and has several fairly innovative features. It also has it's share of bad choices or cockups. It features the main character Edward Carnby who has conveniently lost his memory and wakes up in modern day newyork the hands of thugs who are threatening to kill him. Then all hell breaks loose in the form of weird fissures in the wall that eat people and spew out zombies. You pick up a side kick/love interest in the form of Sarah something or other and then make your way to central park which is used as the main area for the game.

So the weapon and item system allows you to combine stuff you find lying around into more effective weapons. So for instance you can take a bottle of explosive liquid and shove a rag in it to make a molotov, or wrap it in double sided tape to make a sticky bomb which can be set off by gunfire, or even both for similar.

That part of the system works pretty well though to be honest I found myself relying on mostly just throwing the bottles and detonating them with gunfire (which is done in a cool tracking slow motion shot so you can judge the right point to blow it as it arcs towards the target).

However you have a very limited inventory space and I found myself having to forgo some vital items in order to fit most of the kit I needed in my 8 slots (several of which get filled up with un-dropable plot pieces). I had to constantly shuffle inventory around to grab new things.

Still it is a fairly original idea and something I'd like to see in future albeit in a slightly more refined form.

Fire plays a big role in the game most of the bad guys can only be killed by fire. You can either use flaming bullets (made by dipping bullets in flammable liquid which is a bit random but fair enough) to hit their fissures (crack like decals on their bodies, harder enemies have more of them usually in harder to hit places like there back) or you can use molotovs or other explosives or you can use the melee system (where you can pick up a lot of objects axes, bars, bits of tree, fire extinguishers, gas canisters and swing them with the right stick) to beat them unconscious then douse their body in fuel and set them on fire or drag them into a fire. The Melee is quite satisying as an option though tough going, some objects in the game (like wooden things) can be set on fire for extra damage though they do burn out but it gets hard going as more enemies turn up. Gas canisters and mosquito sprays can be used as flame thowers which are very effective tho few and far between in the case of canisters and very short lived in the case of mosquito spray. The whole fire thing works wonderfully it looks great and things burn and break up in a fairly realistic manner.

The Melee fighting and the 3rd person stuff in general suffers from a very poor camera, where possible first person view is the way to go. There should be no excuse in this day and age not to get the a 3rd person camera right since the right stick has been co-opted for the melee system you have to get the auto camera to behave or it's just pointless. The melee and using the right stick to manipulate objects in puzzles does work OK but again it feels like it could have just done with a few more tweaks.

The wound system works by showing injuries on your body which you can then heal with health things like sprays and bandages it's not a hideous way of doing it but I have to agree to with Yathzee that it does look like you have glued slices of ham to your jumper. Also the lack of inventory space usally meant I didn't carry around the bandages which are used when you get the deep wound where you have 6 minutes to bandages it or you bleed to death. As a result I would often be frantically running around central park looking for bandages in the bins while leaving a very nice blood trail behind me.

The Driving is OK some of the scripted sequences where you have to out runs some disaster or other and end in a cool slow motion jump are really good fun. Though the physics system is a bit broken, on more than one occasion I was driving around central park in a car and hit some curb or something that caused the physics engine to balls up, the doors, roof, bonnet, boot and part of the wheels would all fly off clown car style and I would then be launched into the sky and find myself miles above central park flying in my broken car. It would then plummet to earth landing usually on the other side of the map but somehow in a still drivable state.

It also has a few platforming sections where you have to navigate around usually across ropes and up and down stuff dodging things. Most of the time that works OK occasional physics puzzle solving using the physics engine in a pseudo halflife2 manner.

Having said all that I did actually like the game most of the story was fairly compelling (though the ending was a bit of a let down) the item making thing was cool and the use of fire awesome. The way they made a physically reactive world with properties like flammability and destructibility is pretty good. So if there is a locked door and it's made of wood you can shoot out the lock, smash it in with an axe, or set it on fire and wait till it burns away. Metal doors can sometimes be stove in and sometimes need explosives, and a lot of things in the world function in a fairly realistic manner, you can pour flammable liquid on the ground to make trails you can light petrol tanks can be pierced for refills or shot to make a car explode (not very realistic but then more so than the flaming bullets trick).

It is a game trying a lot of new things and pushing the boundries, trouble is it's a half arsed first attempt that probably only a handful of people will appreciate. I would imagine someone else will rip off all it's good ideas and make a game that will sweep the game of the year accolades at some point.

I'd still recommend giving it a go if you find it somewhere for cheap but only if it's cheap it is still a bad game as far as most people are concerned.