Picked this up in my local Currys on Friday afternoon, I was there buying GHII and it was just sitting there on display. Rude not to. It maybe just my store (Aylesford nr Maidstone, Kent) as they have just this week finished a refurb, so maybe in laying out all the stock and boxes that have amounted over the weeks they mistakenly took out the pre-releases. It was ?39.99 (anymore and I would of kept my pre-order at GAME).
There has been some talk of the game only taking 14 hours to complete on the t'internet somewhere, well you can at least double that for me. Isn't it possible to finsh one of the Super Mario games in a few minutes and Super Metriod on the SNES in under 3 hours, yet most of us never get to do that. It appears that with every new release thats leaked out to the shops, someone posts that "it only took me 14 hours". I wonder if that poster was using the in-game clock. After I played it for about 1hr30mins, the in-game clock stated that game time was 38mins?
Without starting an argument here, there is so much dialogue and in-game cut scenes so far that the reason the game is, in some peoples view, so short, could be the disc its on (9GB).
Now, onto the game. First let me point of that I tried KOTR and Jade Empire and got bored pretty quick, the former's framerate being laughable to the point of unplayable and loads of yak-yak-yak and Jade's generally dull action, although I was really looking forward to it at the time.
First thing to note about the game is the music, its great. The sound overall is very good, if a little on the quiet side, expect to crank it up above your normal levels. I knew straight away that I would quite easily get lost in the story and plot, so I switched on subtitles before I started. Chose to go with a Female lead character as I didn't want the cliche of the hard man role again. She looks quite attractive I think, looks a lot like Joanna Dark IMO.
Anyway, story kicks off and its really easy to follow, elements of "2001" are evident here, but the voice acting and the digital on-screen characters are excellent and very detailed and rich. Not much story before your into your first mission. The game does a little bit of explaining about the controls, but not much. Took me a while to figure out that the characters cannot climb or jump, which is quite bizare, so you can guess that most missions will take you on a very predetermined path with no open ended levels to speak of (yet).
I chose my character to be a SOLDIER class, but she cannot handle a sniper rifle for toffee, so I guess the RPG element comes into effect later on with making it better, along with more health and greater stamina to run longer distances.
Design of the interface is excellent, it all uses the analogue stick very well and none of it feels sticky. The Weapons screen, seen in most of the preview videos is quite well implemented overall, you press and HOLD the LB (or is it RB?) button, do what you need to do and then let go, which is great because its not an on/off button press.
The whole space world design is fantastic, really well done, they have nailed what makes scifi great, for the first 2 minutes you know how good its going to be.
Graphics are uniformly excellent, framerate is not. My 360 is literally creaking under the weight of running this game, the open environments appear to stream from the disc (a la PGR) and, as a result, textures load in quite late on some of the cut scenes (think Halo 2 cutscenes), although I have long suspected my 360 discdrive to be shagged for some time now, so some of you may have better luck than me with this. However at times its quite off-putting and spoils the experience, at one point when I reloaded a mission after dying, my 3 characters where standing in front of me while the rest of the background painted its way to the screen for about 2-3 seconds.
I don't think the framerate is game destroying to be honest, but when you see the amount of effort that has gone into this game, its a big shame. This is something I believe lies in the Bioware's coders ability, so far this is 3 games in a row where they have not been able to meet a solid framerate, while others can (COD4, GOW and BIOSHOCK are prime examples). Screen tearing so far is generally there, but not too distracting so far, close interiors fair better, while open environments have it.
Don't know what else to say as to not spoil it for those of you rabid for it, although the framerate and streaming from disc issues generally taint the experience for me personally. Put bluntly this is generally not my type of game, usually too fussy and anal to get into, but so far, given the overall vision of this game and the fact that the story, so far, is very easy to trace and understand, I will be plowing back into it at my next opportunity, and the fact that it will drag me away from COD4 online is some feat!
There has been some talk of the game only taking 14 hours to complete on the t'internet somewhere, well you can at least double that for me. Isn't it possible to finsh one of the Super Mario games in a few minutes and Super Metriod on the SNES in under 3 hours, yet most of us never get to do that. It appears that with every new release thats leaked out to the shops, someone posts that "it only took me 14 hours". I wonder if that poster was using the in-game clock. After I played it for about 1hr30mins, the in-game clock stated that game time was 38mins?
Without starting an argument here, there is so much dialogue and in-game cut scenes so far that the reason the game is, in some peoples view, so short, could be the disc its on (9GB).
Now, onto the game. First let me point of that I tried KOTR and Jade Empire and got bored pretty quick, the former's framerate being laughable to the point of unplayable and loads of yak-yak-yak and Jade's generally dull action, although I was really looking forward to it at the time.
First thing to note about the game is the music, its great. The sound overall is very good, if a little on the quiet side, expect to crank it up above your normal levels. I knew straight away that I would quite easily get lost in the story and plot, so I switched on subtitles before I started. Chose to go with a Female lead character as I didn't want the cliche of the hard man role again. She looks quite attractive I think, looks a lot like Joanna Dark IMO.
Anyway, story kicks off and its really easy to follow, elements of "2001" are evident here, but the voice acting and the digital on-screen characters are excellent and very detailed and rich. Not much story before your into your first mission. The game does a little bit of explaining about the controls, but not much. Took me a while to figure out that the characters cannot climb or jump, which is quite bizare, so you can guess that most missions will take you on a very predetermined path with no open ended levels to speak of (yet).
I chose my character to be a SOLDIER class, but she cannot handle a sniper rifle for toffee, so I guess the RPG element comes into effect later on with making it better, along with more health and greater stamina to run longer distances.
Design of the interface is excellent, it all uses the analogue stick very well and none of it feels sticky. The Weapons screen, seen in most of the preview videos is quite well implemented overall, you press and HOLD the LB (or is it RB?) button, do what you need to do and then let go, which is great because its not an on/off button press.
The whole space world design is fantastic, really well done, they have nailed what makes scifi great, for the first 2 minutes you know how good its going to be.
Graphics are uniformly excellent, framerate is not. My 360 is literally creaking under the weight of running this game, the open environments appear to stream from the disc (a la PGR) and, as a result, textures load in quite late on some of the cut scenes (think Halo 2 cutscenes), although I have long suspected my 360 discdrive to be shagged for some time now, so some of you may have better luck than me with this. However at times its quite off-putting and spoils the experience, at one point when I reloaded a mission after dying, my 3 characters where standing in front of me while the rest of the background painted its way to the screen for about 2-3 seconds.
I don't think the framerate is game destroying to be honest, but when you see the amount of effort that has gone into this game, its a big shame. This is something I believe lies in the Bioware's coders ability, so far this is 3 games in a row where they have not been able to meet a solid framerate, while others can (COD4, GOW and BIOSHOCK are prime examples). Screen tearing so far is generally there, but not too distracting so far, close interiors fair better, while open environments have it.
Don't know what else to say as to not spoil it for those of you rabid for it, although the framerate and streaming from disc issues generally taint the experience for me personally. Put bluntly this is generally not my type of game, usually too fussy and anal to get into, but so far, given the overall vision of this game and the fact that the story, so far, is very easy to trace and understand, I will be plowing back into it at my next opportunity, and the fact that it will drag me away from COD4 online is some feat!
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