Listen,

I'm not going to try and pawn myself off as a person who can write up a professional review because we all know if I could do that, I wouldn't be writing in a blog, I'd be writing for a gaming website or a magazine. So why the rest of you try to pass yourselves off as reviewers that think we give a shit, i'll never know.

So with that being said, let me just say that a game has 10 minutes to suck me in (especially if I have no idea what the fuck it is) OR if it has been something I have been waiting on coming out, then I tend to be a little bit bias and give it about an hour to let me know what I have coming to me.

I go to the video store every monday and thursday to hire a different game and try it out for the night (that is if my night is not occupied with having sex with my hand or my girlfriend [yes, believe it].) So today being monday, I was going to go and hire COD4 again because I wanna play online with my boys again. So being the annoying cunt that I am I decided to go to the video store 10 minutes before it shut and go to hire the mighty COD4 out...unfortunately karma is a bitch and my little act of fucking up their closing for the night, came and bit me in the arse when they announced that I owed them 84 dollars and 40 cents. I put the game down on the counter for them to put back and walked out knowing that for that price I could buy the fucken game at Church (EB, for all you people whom don't know me).

Off to the next video store, which was just down the road and open for a little longer, so blah, blah, blah...COD4 was out and Alone in the Dark was in. So being a fan of survival horror I decided to walk out with that as well as hire out the movie Daywatch (and if you don't know what Daywatch is, go die in a hole).

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Gameplay Trailer:


Total time of play...1 hour before I decided I am wasting my life playing this just as the developers wasted their life making it. Now don't get me wrong, certain aspects of the game I liked. The graphics and character models for example were some of the best I have seen...but I don't hire a survival horror game because I want to see nice, sharp, crispt graphics, NO! I hire one so I can have the living piss scared out of me. Let me put it this way...Playing this game after playing games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil 2 is like watching I still know, but maybe I forgot when I hit my head on the kitchen bench when I slipped on the wet floor, what you did last Summer after watching The Ring. You just can't watch it without knowing you have already experienced something better and watching this is a waste of time.

The Ring Tape, quality eerie shit:


It is the same with this game, in the brief time which I got to play this guy who doesn't know what the fuck he is doing, all I could think was, 'this isn't doing much for me'. Sure, scaling a building that is falling apart on a cable was ok, but it's not the kind of horror thats going to suck me in to something I want to piss myself over. And even when shit was suppose to be scary and dark, all it did was piss me off because the controls and camera angles are too fucked. To pick up items you have the lead character in the EXACT spot needed to collect them, merge your control stick only a tad and you have to find the damn spot again to collect the weapon or the object. And when you have a pissed off demon / zombie / non-original monster thing coming at you with the typical hissing and a look of flesh rape in his eyes, you are wanting to pick something up mighty fucken quick and as I stated, it doesn't add to the horror when you can't pick it up, it adds to the level of how hard you are going to throw your controller at your television when you get your cock ripped off.

Remember the movie?..try not to


The few puzzles I had to solve in the time slot I gave this game to impress me were fail also, example: find a fire extinguisher (which is conveniently in the small area that is not consumed in flames EVERY time), put it on the floor where a rope is coming off it, climb to the second level, jump on the rope to pull the piece of flooring with the fire extinguisher up to the second level to put the fire out...ok, this is a guy that can scale up a building on a rope in less than a minute while pieces are flying at him but he can't throw a fire extinguisher up 2 meters to another level.

The girl that ended up walking around with me was a fucken idiot as well, she obviously knows something fucked up is going on (unless she lives in the elevator that I found her in) and she continues to scream for help once I reach her, I can only hope that she dies later on in the game for all you people that decide this game is worthy of more than one hour of your life. But for me, I kinda wish I could have my hour back.

H.P.Lovecraft - The original master of Horror


I have respect for the Alone in the Dark installments because it was the first ever 3D survival horror game to come out in 1992, beating Resident Evil to the plate by 4 years and it was heavily inspired by H.P.Lovecraft's written works (which fascinate me [no, I'm not gay]). So, it is upsetting to learn that I find this game to fail at sucking me in because there is so much about its history I love. But you get that...

This game seemed to go the way of many survival horrors of late and decided to ditch the atmoshperic ambience of evil in previous workings and replaced it with a consistant Jerry Bruckheimer presence. Even Resident Evil 4, which seemed to have tonned down completely on the amount of eerie horror and instead went for a more Hollywood action horror feel, still knew how to go about sucking me in the right way...I'm more pissed off than dissapointed with this game.

But as I said, I only gave it an hour, but if a game can't do it for me in that time, I'm not going to waste anymore of my time trying to force it upon myself, even if I respect its history.

When I think survival horror, I think of the section in Resident Evil 2 where you walk down the dead silent hallway of a cop station of a completely abandoned city, and when all you can hear is your footsteps hitting the floor, out of nowhere comes 3 sets of zombie arms smashing through the wall coming strait at you...I nearly jumped through the fucken roof. When I think survival horror, I think of the very pleasant part in Condemned 2 where you are in a dark and broke as shit bathroom of an abandoned building and see a mannequin in front of you, only to turn around to where you just were to see 5 staring strait at you that were not there originally...Yes, that freaked the piss out of me.

Condemned 2's famous mannequin scene:


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So to sum it up:
Total play time before conclusion - 1 hour
Graphics - Pretty sick
Story - Not interesting enough to hold me in
Characters - Look good but pretty clichéd
Scare Factor - None

FINAL RESULT:



Thats it from me for now...
Much love & respect (obviously)
Moses