I love this little casual game. I first bought it for my iPhone, and when I became addicted, I also downloaded the Mac version. It’s also been ported to the PC, the iPad and Flash so that it can be played on the web. PopCap made sure that there’s no escape.
I prefer playing it on the iPhone – this tower defense game variant really benefits from the iPhone multi touch display, and I can imagine that this could be a killer app for the iPad. The screen size of the iPad is perfect for this game, and it’s so much easier to play with the tap interface instead of moving and clicking the mouse.
Now what’s it all about? Like I’ve said, it’s basically a tower defense game. Waves of different zombies are trying to reach your house in order to have a little dinner party with your brain as the main course. To defend yourself, you can place different kinds of plants in your garden and backyard, including water plants in the swimming pool. There are peashooters, man-eating plants and poisonous mushrooms just to name a few. And there are football player zombies, lawn mower zombies and many others. Even a Michael Jackson Moonwalker zombie with an accompanying zombie ballet.
This game is not an interactive Alan Wake movie, but it’s real fun and great if you only want to play for a few minutes at a time.
Finally: After several months of poor or mediocre releases, there’s finally a new blockbuster game worth playing!
Alan Wake is more like an interactive horror movie than it is a third person shooter. It’s got great atmosphere, a twisted multi-layered and well written and narrated story line, it pushes the graphics capabilities of the Xbox 360 beyond her limits and it offers a deeply immersive (single player) gaming experience.
You follow bestseller author Alan Wake on a vacation with his wife and muse to a lake house near the small town Bright Falls where he hopes to finally break his writer’s block that has been keeping him from writing a new book for two years already. But reality is quickly falling apart in this interactive movie, when you discover that the lake where you are spending your vacation has the power to make works of art and fiction come true and that a dark force wants to use your creative skills to set itself free.
The lake house was formerly owned by another author who appears in your nightmares and whose story is somehow interwoven with your own fate. You begin to find pages of a manuscript which appears to have been written by you, but you cannot remember ever having worked on it. But what really cracks the borders of your mental sanity is that those pages describe events that happen only after you have found them.
When your wife suddenly disappears, you have to find out whether you are a real person in charge of your life or whether you have been written by someone and are only a character in a horror story with self awareness, but without any influence on your own destiny. But whether you are a fictive character yourself or not, you have to write your own ending to the story in order to get your lover back from the darkness that took her.
An odyssey through the works of yourself and the author who visited you in your nightmares begins, with the materialized darkness in close pursuit.
Thanks to Microsoft’s intervention, Alan Wake is an Xbox 360-exclusive title and the PC version that was under development is being held back and might never hit the shelves of a store. But Xboxes are cheap, so if you don’t already own one, you should definitely get one to play this game. It’s well worth it.
UPDATE: Maybe I should mention that many of the ideas in Alan Wake remind me of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness. It doesn’t really matter, though. Alan Wake has a life and soul of its own. But if you liked John Carpenter’s movie, chances are that you will also enjoy this game.
