So I bought this game, Alone in the Dark, going on my gut. The same gut that bought Dino Crisis 3. It did not redeem itself. Ok first, the graphics are pretty ok in a few places, but on the whole, this looks like a first gen Xbox 360 game, especially with how bad the characters look. (Think Condemned: Criminal Origins, and give all the characters PSone era animations) Enemies also look pretty terrible, and the injury/healing system is pretty atrocious on the eyes. Carnby can be cut, and even bleed out if injured too bad. But you can heal his wounds before they reach that level of bad, but the wounds, whether open or healed up and scarring, look like really silly flesh colored patches on his clothes.

So, those pretty graphics you may have been drooling over recently? They are a terrible lie. The gameplay is the real stinker though. The controls are just barely a smidge better than old school RE tank controls for accuracy, and shooting takes you into a poor looking first person perspective. (I get so sick of first person views that make me feel like a floating camera with a gun attached) Which feels awful loose. The melee combat is also weak as hell, with swings being controlled by the right stick. It feels weak, and lacks any kind of impact, and humanoid enemies must always be finished off with fire.

The whole idea being passed off of having so many McGuyver esque solutions to a problem is also a lie, you actually pretty much do the same few things over and over. It has flashes of potential, and you may be willing to look past the gimped controls and failure to deliver on any of the pre-release hype, but then you'll go into the driving sequences, which seem to have been made to look cool, with actually being playable being a distant after thought. The cars control poorly, and get stuck on random elements, leading to many frustrating deaths. The game also suffers from an assortment of glitching, with Carnby passing clean through objects, and sometimes his car falling through the middle of a solid road into an invisible pit.

Which makes you wonder what, exactly, they actually did during the years of delays this game had. Making a good Alone in the Dark game is possible, but Eden games and Atari have seriously screwed up the remaining reputation for this series with this unfinished, buggy, disasterbacle. Likely also screwed over any chance of a better team being willing to pick this series up from them and give it a go, at least this gen. Gotta wait a few years for people to forget this one. Too bad.

Gotta wait on Siren Episodes for my survival horror fix, I guess.