The importance of a good control scheme

One of the games I've been playing lately is Alan Wake, a survival horror game from Remedy Entertainment which is the same studio behind the classic third person shooter Max Payne. And in many ways, this shows in the game as it contains a lot of similar elements to Max Payne (such as the broody protagonist who likes the sound of his own voice a bit too much). Of course, the key difference is that Alan Wake is a survival horror game (although the developers are billing it as a psychological thriller).

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will know that I do enjoy playing scary games. However, there is a big difference in style between a game like F.E.A.R., which is a shoot em up where you carry a boatload of heavy armament, and survival horror games like Alan Wake where you spend half your time worrying if you are going to have enough ammo for your pistol.

Believe it or not, Alan Wake is actually the first survival horror game that I have ever played. I was interested in Dead Space but it came out around the time when I was boycotting EA which is why I skipped it. I was also interested in the Resident Evil games but never got into them because of the horrible control scheme.

And this is really the first thing worth mentioning about Alan Wake. The game controls like every other TPS on the market and feels great because of it. You can strafe left or right, you can sprint (but only over short distances), you can walk in one direction while looking in a different direction (also known as turning your head). You never feel like you are fighting the clumsy control scheme instead of the monsters which inhabit the darkness. Ultimately, the control scheme makes the whole game better simply because it allows me to focus on the story instead of thinking about how I'm going to control my avatar.

And having played Alan Wake, it just makes it even more incomprehensible why the Resident Evil series continues to use an old and outdated control scheme.