One of the things I remember people who didn't enjoy Alan Wake being unhappy about was that the combat got repetitive. I wonder if Remedy didn't try to avoid that by simply having less of it altogether.
I thought the gameplay itself was good but limited.
The game basically boils down to this: Cutscene, show segment, gameplay, cutscene, show, gameplay.
The cutscenes and show were very story heavy, but when you got to the gameplay, it was just shooting. Shooting only. And if you weren't shooting, then the gameplay was only walking.
It would have been nice if they'd been a little more creative with the gameplay.
I thought the powers were cool and mechanics handled well, but... I don't know how to describe it. It's like gamers and developers consider one thing to be gameplay, and it has to be shooting. We've got this great story to tell, and we're putting a lot of effort into the story, but how do we turn that into a game? So they tell the story and remove any interaction from it, but to make it a game they throw in some random shooting of endless bad guys because that's what a game is and that's all a game can be.
That's what was disappointing to me. They take control away from you for the majority of the game, but here's some shooting because gamers are idiots and it's all we want.
That's one of the things that is intriguing to me about Hellblade. Tameem talks about breaking that cycle of expectations that every game has to meet. Immerse me in the experience and don't just give me the cliche gameplay bits.
