Today Remedy Games have released the first DLC for Alan Wake. The Signal is a epilogue to the main story of the 2010 hit game. The add-on starts off like every other episode of Alan Wake by showing us what previously happened, ending with the famous quote “It’s not a lake. It’s an ocean!” And it is as we soon discover just how deep and creepy this ocean gets.

The Signal has been priced at 560 msp or roughly $7 US. But not to worry if you purchased the game new you should have your insert that provides a redeemable code to download the content free of charge. If by some chance you were one of the knuckle heads who tried to redeem this DLC before it was released not to worry Microsoft is working on the issue and will soon be e mailing all afflicted gamers new DLC codes to replace their now useless ones.

Car-nado

If you enjoyed the main story of Alan Wake there is no doubt you will enjoy this add on. Plus its free so get it anyway. The first thing I noticed when playing was that the enemies are much tougher, smarter, and there are a lot more of them. In some areas they even seem to infinitely respawn no matter what you do. This makes it extremely difficult to look for the always annoying collectibles. There are two new forms of the collectible, six cardboard cut outs and ten alarm clocks. Both have achievements to go with the collecting of them.

The DLC ran about two hours long for me on normal. This should be pretty standard for most players I think as I have beaten the game on nightmare mode and still had a bit of difficulty with this on normal. During these two hours there a lot of different scenery changes going from a town to the woods and also spending lots of time outside as well as in. One example of one of the more terrifying sequences take place in a basement that can be described as nothing short of Freddy Krueger’s boiler room. With exploding furnaces abound and unrelenting enemies attacking from all directions.

There are eight new achievements for the Signal. The achievements add up to 250 gamerscore bringing Alan Wake’s overall achievable score up to 1250 which I will get because believe me I will go back and get that last fucking coffee thermos! The most difficult new achievement has to be Run-On Sentence which for 50 gamerscore requires you to complete the episode without reloading the game or restarting a checkpoint. So basically you have to do the whole thing in one sitting without dying. Going to be a tough one fore sure.

If you haven’t started downloading this amazing add on already what are you waiting for its probably free for you and if not it is definitely worth the 560 msp. Pick it up now exclusively on Xbox Live.