Most gaming magazines and a good chuck of The Web are panning the latest installment into the Alone in the Dark Franchise as a failure and a major disappointment. Is it? In a word, yes, but it has its moments.

Yes, the sporatic camera angles are about as useful those in Cloverfield. Yes, inventory management is a damn nightmare at best. And yes, the episodic format only succeeds in launching the player into one frustrating scenario after another, but a couple of the sequences are fun. Well sort of…

Alone in the Dark’s largest problem is that it spends too much time trying to reinvent the wheel and not enough time utilizing some of the time-tested techniques that have made survival horror such a popular genre—not to mention a genre virtually invented by this series. So, Alone in the Dark’s designers worked hard to break out of their own box and included off the wall puzzles, homemade weapons, playable car chase scenes, and the joy of several blue collar tasks like operating a forklift or putting out flames with a fire extinguisher. I think I might have fought more fires than zombies and these many different mode of game play, constant change of setting, and tone break up the action to the point that the gamer never is able to settle into environment that he finds creepy enough to start slowly inching around corners or wondering what is going to jump out next.

The annoying attempt to add realism to the game by replacing a normal inventory system with an actually view of the inside of Carnby’s jacket does not help matters. While it looks cool, the first two or three times you see it, the tedious item juggling that results is not worth it. To make matters worse, the inventory screen does not pause the action. While you are scrambling to construct a Maltov cocktail zombies are continuing to gnaw on your flesh.
Unfortunately, the injury and life recovery system is based on the same concept: a view of Carnby from the neck down and another tedious process which has the player spraying each wound with antiseptic and slapping on a bandage, no more downing a flask of brandy that fixed you right up like in the good old trilogy. Technology has progressed from those days and now gamers can have the fun of bandaging every single wound themselves!

The most fun I got out of this game was walking around sewers and abandoned subway stations, with a lighter and aerosol can, torching zombies. That’s about as good as it gets. The 9mm pistol will often empty half of a clip before the ghoul starts even walking funny, and you need bullets to solve just about every other puzzle so you myswell save them. Somehow, this game has even succeeded in taking away the simple pleasure of shooting zombies. Tsk tsk.

Alone in the Dark does have its amusing moments and the DVD style chapter selection allows the player to bang this one out in a long rainy afternoon without getting stuck, but the game overall is probably the worst thing to hit this franchise since Uwe Boll. This game is a prime example of what happens when designers concern themselves more with attempting to be innovative than gameplay.