Okay, so I got it today and have played it for a few hours. Playing the game with all settings maxed and turned on, 1600x1200, 2X AA. It's usually playable with 4X AA, but occasionally I come up on areas that do cause significant slowdown, so I keep it at 2X and the game seems to stay above 20FPS. From what I can tell, it's a great game. But not fantastic. I'll probably end up rating it either an 8.0 or 8.5. I'll just go down the list of things I'm not digging so much.
-The handholding stuff with the flashing cots and medkits and highlighted signs is just stupid, and I get the feeling it's something they added when they adapted the game to consoles. It's not just annoying; highlighted signs at forks in the road mean you don't have to actually slow down and read the sign, you just follow the rainbow-colored one, and it sort of kills immersion for me when that happens.
-Enemy soldiers can take a ridiculous amount of shots. Short bursts even at point blank won't work; count on emptying at least 10 rounds into a guy with AR's to be sure he dies when you stop firing. I'm playing on normal, I should add.
-Enemy soldiers feel a little static to getting hit. They do flinch, but the animation doesn't seem right, and the blood spurts look unnatural. They look like when you put your thumb over the end of a running hose, then remove it and put it back quickly to let out a sort of short, globby gush. That's what the blood sprays look like. Overall, shooting men in the game feels like shooting a man-sized Caprisun bag. :P It doesn't help, I guess, that weapons aren't especially accurate (which is fine).
-There really is almost no interactivity. For a game with lots of objects and bobbles just lying around that do have active physics on them, so you can bump them and move them if you want, it's disappointing you can't actually do anything with them. So the environments feel kind of static, though they're better than CoD4's with its immovable, solid titanium barrels. Also, the destruction of foliage, as I had suspected, is kind of overrated. Plenty of plants aren't destructible "by the leaf." It honestly doesn't feel any better than Crysis's destruction. In fact, take into account all kinds of destruction (huts, wooden fences, breakable objects, trees), and Crysis actually has more things to destroy, and they destroy better at that thanks to a more impressive physics engine.
-ShaunMC mentioned in the GS review that lines of dialogue sound like the VA's are intentionally rushing through them to fit more audio on the disc, and I thought that was probably presumptuous at first... But he's right, that really is what it sounds like. Almost all dialogue is delivered in a sort of run-on sentence way of speaking, and one just can't help but think they're doing it on purpose. The VA's are average at best to begin with, but the short and snappy dialect makes the voicework sound downright poor overall.
-There are a lot of giant outcrops of rock beside a lot of the roads, and there's no way to actually get up on top of these and use them as vantage points or something. In effect, quite a few of the pathways feel narrow and linear, and a lot of the roadway is almost like a simple maze as opposed to just marked paths through a totally open land that you can traverse any section of if you like. Now don't get me wrong, there are some very open sections, but there are some pretty linear parts, too. And there are even some objective points that don't really feel like you can come at them from absolutely any direction you'd like.
There are some other minor points, but I don't want to keep going on about all this. In any case, if all this sounds horrible, it's not. This game is genuinely great, and most of these things feel like small annoyances or things that "could have been." I can tell without a doubt already that there's potential this game has that just wasn't exploited, as well as some slightly rough or underdeveloped aspects to the gameplay here and there, but it certainly doesn't ruin anything, and I am having quite a lot of fun playing it right now. :)
Log in to comment