Expect to die a lot and not in a good way, not the "dark souls" way.
1. Difficulty: the normal mode, called "Hard" is quite difficult actually. Expect to die a lot even if you're an old-school FPS genre fan.
This punishing difficulty is because you are vulnerable almost as the enemies that you shoot at. You are fragile and outnumbered throughout the whole game.
The cover system, well, it's not for you, it's for the aliens. In fact, you will find yourself in the middle of raging aliens coming at you from different directions shooting whatever they got at you. so don't expect to just get some cover and regen your health peacefully while the enemies chat a little. it's not gonna happen. you will be flanked. you will be attacked constantly. You are not safe. you gotta move and shoot your way out of this hell hole. seems interesting to you? then don't get me wrong. it's not as interesting as it seems. This punishing difficulty is neither rewarding nor satisfying in any way. it's not challenging. it's stupidly dump. you are not going to feel that adrenaline rush. expect a lot of frustration.
2. Gameplay and mechanics:
-Solid shooting mechanics. you feel the impact of the bullets. Explosions feel powerful and satisfying. actually, the game is quite strong when it comes to the shooting part. it's well done.
-Weapons: there's no big arsenal in this game. most probably you will use the same couple of weapons you start the game with throughout your whole playthrough, your ordinary marine machine gun and the aliens energy blaster. you won't use your shotgun at all. why? because you have to get really close and this means death in a matter of seconds even before you shoot a second guy. Every weapon has an alternative firing mode, explosive sort of firepower, which is quite useful for crowd control.
So there is no variety at all. you will stick to the same gun as long as you have ammo. they all feel the same.
-Enemies: you will meet about 5 to 7 types of enemies in general, 3 of which are common, an invisible infiltrator which is not quite invisible, a warrior who is their edition of a marine and a grenadier. so expect to shoot the same aliens for hours.
-Cover system: Destructible. explosions can and will probably get you. the enemies will run towards you especially the infiltrator. you will probably kill an infiltrator by mistake because they are always rushing to your face.
You won't rely on the cover system at all.
-Boss fights: very difficult. quite frustrating. annoying and not enjoyable. Bosses pack huge and destructive firepower. Don't expect "dark souls" adrenaline rush. expect cursing a lot though, out of f***** frustration.
-Scoring system: simple and not well developed. you get extra scores for headshots and explosive kills, nothing else. it's not like "bulletstorm", which had some nice scoring system and a variety of ways to kill your opponents.
-there is no character leveling system. you can choose 3 active perks at a time between 12 perks. you get to open 3 perks at a time when you reach a specific score milestone. but they are quite useless. they are not going to give you the edge you need, at all.
3.Plot: very weak. the game is not story-driven. it's as simple as "Go to the next dot on your screen and shoot aliens. then do it a lot more."
no character development. you get to see your protagonist couple of times and you will hear his voice but he is quite unremarkable and forgettable.
Audio logs are hidden throughout the game, they can give you some in-sight of is going on. but you won't be looking for them because the whole story is unattractive and dull.
4.Graphics:
first of all, i played the PC version of the game so i ought to tell you my PC setup so that you can a reference to how your rigs are going to perform:
a GTX 560Ti, an I5 2500K and 4gb of ram, nothing overclocked.
The graphics options:
Resoluion, Vsync, Post processing, textures, shadows and AA.
The game is running on DX9, powered by UE3, and it looks beautiful. nice particle effects, nice lighting, great DOF and good-looking character models to some extent. overall the game is quite acceptable in terms of graphics. i
in terms of performance:
-The anti-aliasing is MSAA only and as always is quite demanding.
-The textures quality is good but expect some low Res textures here and there. (doesn't affect performance at all)
-shadows are mediocre. They are not jagged at all. but don't expect any dynamic lighting or AO solutions. (doesn't affect performance at all)
-post processing is nice, adding some nice immersive details to the effects and the explosions look good. though it's quite demanding. from medium to high means minus 10 frames per second.
overall the game looks good and runs fine.
Hope you liked the review. i am still new to reviewing games. i am not a native English speaker so sorry for any mistakes. i appreciate feedback. thanks for reading.