Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

The lightning is really gorgeous in the game and as always I think raytracing is not really worth the performance impact if. The game looks almost the exact same without.

I wonder if you could tune the lightning in UE5 to look like that, I always wonder how much of a games looks is actually the engine and how much is just the art direction and the devs skills to get out of the engine what they want.

I think the game itself was rather disappointing. Too much walking sym, combat was downgraded and less fun, made worse by too few save points at times so you fear to die to not get annoyed to do sections over and over again that makes you hesitant to play on hardest difficulty.

Conclusion wall is way to basic and simple you can just quickly trail and error it. And it FORCES you to advance things on the wall that are clear anyway. I had it only one time where I left it for a while and when I look back into it she was like "we already got this" and put on a bunch of cards automatically, but generally speaking you need to advance it all the time. There is one situation, there is a place, where a reviewer passed by countless times and it turns out the key item you need ONLY appears when you advance the wall. Kind of stupid game design.

Its a movie game mostly, a "press button to advance story" game. The first was like that as well but I think it had better and more gameplay, better pacing that was actually fun.

Writing was obnoxiously pretentious and dragged on for too long. After 10 hours the same Alan Wake tropes get repeated over and over again and the game ends is a cliffhanger to shill some DLC. Really makes me loose my last bit of faith in the gamers, I already do not trust game "journalist" anymore for a long time but I at least could rely on userscores in the past, this game is like praised into high heavens by everyone for no reason. The best think it has to offer is graphics but they to not make for a good game.

There are large areas in the game the story does not even lead you though, just some stupid collectibles and these boxes with stuff you do not need. I did not even find the crossbow and did not care to look up where to find it, just had a bunch of arrows. I think the game got many people a boner because of the graphics and their brain shut off. The actual game is actually not that good.

And not to forget now how insanely woke the beginning of the game is, thanks to Sweet Baby Inc. they hired to rewrite the game with some woke trash dialog in the beginning and of course the race swap of Saga who was written a white Fin women. Her self made sweater does not fit her at all. 0.5% of Finnish women are black but hey DIVERSITY so they could just keep the story and hot two birds with once stone. My issue is not that she is black, my issue is that she was FORCED in by a company that should not exist, accompanied with woke cringe dialog. Because Remedy does not really care but is taken over by the woke mind virus. If they come up with a original story with a black lead they write themselves I am all for it, but not like this. But nobody cares and I am going to get downvoted for this, I know how it goes.

My limited exposure to it (via s&box) is extremely positive, the hammer mapping tool is absolutely amazing to work with, and from what I've seen way ahead of unity / unreal on this front at-least.

Of course it's their choice where to release it, but saying, specifically, that it doesn't affect any consumer is just plain wrong.