My impressions after a day with the game. I'm doing a bullet pointy thing because I want to get back to some games.
+ The visuals are nuts. Jotaro's complaints are shitcanned by the in-game cutscenes. The campaign is a toilet, but the ingame cut scenes so far have been amazine. Like Gears but smoother. The engine delivers just about everywhere. Honestly, it's almost too detailed. All the textures, especially in the scifi levels, are soooooo detailed that you are still picking up touches after hours of play. It's all so effortless. The fan on my 8800 isn't even kicking in and the game is locked at 60fps, never a hitch. A technical marvel. Makes Hellgate look even shittier. On a perf level, this makes every game ever look like shit. Fuck, if this makes a vsynced 60fps on my rig, it makes me wish the UE people made Crysis. Maybe it wouldn't run terribly!
+ The gameplay is UT. As fast as ever. Weapons and animations as crazy and over the top as ever.
+ Decent netcode. Not OMG incredible, but it's mostly solid. Not a drop in a day of playing on multiple servers. Not very laggy.
+ Pretty polished. UT games have always had slick menus, and this is no exception. Reviews seem to be dinging it for feeling like a console game, but if they are bitching about the front end of this, god help them if they ever happen across the humungadunga UI disasters that are PC strat games.
+ Maps. Fanboys are (of course) bitching, but the maps are UT maps! The all have that UT-y design to them that make doing level looping pretty easy.
The minuses.
- The gameplay is, for better and worse, UT. To make things worse, no bomb run, no assault, no onslaught. The new Warzone or whatever mode is okay, but I'll miss the other two. Heck, I would have been happy if they just ported em up.
- Not a ton of players online. . .yet. I am positive this will change, and it gives me time to learn the ropes. Also, the beta patches have apparently been seeded to community members, so a lot of people have them already.
- They didn't change up the weapons. If you're going to realease semi-regular installments of these things, you need to mix up the weapons. If you are going to remodel them and give them new effects, at least come up with something different.
- Coming from Live, multiplayer options aren't super hot. Apparently addressed in one of the beta patches. Truth be told, I just want more stat tracking and maybe ranked matches. Oh well. Also, no built in voice chat that I have seen. That's not a huge deal for me, but I think that's a no no for online games at this point.
Overall, I think the reviews have been on the money 4.5 or 8/10. It's a refinement, not a reinvention, and I can understand that some fanboys are kind of not thrilled. I like it though. Love it even.
