Ultimately, Alan Wake is every bit as compulsive and satisfying as the fiction on which it riffs, but it also runs the risk of being equally forgettable. It's a game that delivers the requisite number of twists, turns and thrills, but the only real revelations take place on those scattered manuscript pages.

Alan Wake is an accessible, undemanding game with a neat combat mechanic and decent visuals. It's just not a very original game, it's certainly not an exceptional one, and it's a shame it wasn't ready a few years ago.

Alan Wake himself is a cold, moody and clinical character, so much so that Gamestyle felt no affinity with his onscreen presence. We however, warmed to the actual gaming experience, but still left short changed and disappointed, especially after such a long gestation period.

Alan Wake has been as hyped as it has been delayed, but now the game is finally here. It starts off as a psychological thriller but quickly switch to a more action oriented experience with light sourced and firearms as the primary gameplay pillars. Alan Wake is a two faced experience, with one side sporting great action and atmosphere and the other side sporting crude graphics and flawed gameplay. But the one issue that hampers the experience the most is the overly linear and repetitive structure of the game. Put these issues aside and you've still got a highly entertaining and atmospheric experience.

Great thriller will reward patient gamers with a great atmosphere and multilayered story. Don't expect anything less…or anything more. [Issue#192]

Great eerie graphics and sound make for a chilling setting in Remedy's long-awaited psychological thriller. It's a shame the enemies are dull clones, that the gunplay gets old fast and that it never really gets scary.

Surprises that turn into expectations; non-adventuring; facial animations that can't keep up with the scenery and objects in the game world without weight physics: these are all elements, that if done well, would round out the game to make it the epic it was hyped to be. In the end, I feel safer in Remedy's woods than I do in the actual backcountry of Washington.

Remedy loves to compare its game with television hits like Heroes and Lost, but if you look at gameplay rather than story, it becomes clear that Alan Wake is not a "complete first season on DVD". It is more like an unbearably long pilot episode that gave all its cards away well before the third act. Judging by the final titles, Alan Wake's journey through the night will continue (in fact, two DLCs are already shooting for your wallet), so it's high time to switch gears and introduce new ideas.

While the dark spooky woods environment can get a little tedious - as can the combat, the story telling is compelling enough to keep you moving forward and just when you finally think you know what is going on, the game will turn it upside down, flip you the bird, and have you rethinking everything all over again - right up until the credits roll.

Alan Wake puts up a front of being cerebral and deep, but it simply doesn't do the legwork to back it up. I had significant difficulty becoming invested in the events and found it very hard to care about anything that happened from start to finish.

When presented with an infinite number of possible resolutions, any answer is going to feel arbitrary. Alan Wake starts strong but finishes weak; neither the gameplay nor the story deliver on their potential by the time the credits roll.