so I got it to work (drivers were out of date.)
First impressions of 20 minutes of play:
- It is pretty and very detailed, but I'm rather underwhelmed by the look of the textures. They're very low-res, have a plastic shine to them (though that's typical of id), and, to be honest, they seem more cell-shaded than Borderlands...
While I applaud how smoothly the game runs, if it comes at the expense of looking like an Xbox360 game, I'd rather run at half the frames and have it looking better.
Admittedly this is on a card that's not the greatest in the world for gaming, but it still looks pretty... mediocre. I'll have to see what it looks like on my 5850 tonight.
- Tons of invisible walls. I come upon a huge hole in a wall in the first bandit lair, that leads to the outside. Cool. I try to jump over the 1 foot high wall, and can't. Super-soldier from the Arc, but you can't jump for shit.
Not ten seconds later, you come upon a wall the same height, and the game tells you to hit Space to jump, and you jump over the wall no problem. Sigh.
- Not sure how I feel about the bullets affecting your enemies just yet. First bandit runs up at me, I shoot him in the face, he keeps running straight at me. Now, I'm not sure what kind of god-awful mutations will be unleashed on mankind after a moon-wrecking meteor slams into the Earth, but somehow I doubt that "take a bullet to the face and keep right on going" is one of them.
The next bandit I shoot in the leg, and he keeps running at me. I shoot him in the leg again, and he keeps running at me. Well, that doesn't work, so I shoot him the chest. Apparently that triggered his "low health animation", because all of a sudden he starts limping.
Err... so I shoot you in the leg TWICE, and you keep running, then I shoot you in the chest and suddenly you're limping? :\
- Minigames. In a fucking id Software game...
Again, this is from my first 20 minutes. I have exactly one weapon, so it's not as if I'm knee-deep in what the game has to offer.
One thing I will say is that it is very atmospheric. The level design is gorgeous (even if everything is oversized—I wish I didn't play a 4'5" person in every FPS), it does move smoothly (if it hadn't with these graphics, I'd have been pissed...) and the sound is fantastic.
After all the hooplah, though, I expected it to look a fuck of a lot better than it does...
Creston