First impressions, alright, here goes:
I'm about 2.5 hours in, completed the first 4 steps of the prologue.
It looks great, no doubts, my computer can almost run high smoothly, just a tad jerky now and then but I had texture popping on medium and it drove me nuts. Just for reference, Phenom II x4 920 & a GTX 260.
Story is good so far.
Don't believe anything you read about this being exclusively a PC game, the UI was designed to work for a joystick on consoles, no doubt about it. The UI is not nearly as immersive as the originals. Big blank screens with boring circles to click on. Think Mass Effect or Alpha Protocol. No mouseovers for items or equipped comparisons. I'm not very far into the game but at first glance I like TW1's character skill development more, I liked the copper/silver/gold coin thing, it was unique and worked well.
Very limited keyboard remapping, I'm not sure the devs tried to play the game with mouse & keyboard. You can only see one usable item at a time despite having 5 "pockets" and you can only cycle "next" through them, no previous button. Very irritating. Pressing 5-9 immediately casts a sign, not selects it. Of course unless you're bigfoot you have to take your hands off the WASD to reach 7-9 for sure and that makes you a sitting duck. Inventory and character screens don't make a good use of the screen space available. No mouse wheel binding, would really like to have that to scroll through items in your pockets at the very least.
If you played TW1 with the zoomed out overhead camera, be prepared to be disappointed. You're tightly locked in a third-person view now and I have camera clipping issues and stuck on wall corners a lot because of it. Makes combat much less tactical and a lot more frenetic because it's essentially a first person view, you have no idea what's going on around you. Finishing moves feel really disjointed because it shifts the camera angle to show you how awesome you killed that guy, feels like having your camera cut when you're driving to show someone else crash in Burnout Paradise, yeah, everyone hated that too. By the time you've regained camera control, you're being stabbed in the back by the other 4 bad guys.
Combat is very hard even on normal. Prohibitively hard in my opinion. Just like most of you guys, I'm a hardcore gamer that's been playing RPGs for 20+ years and I can't remember the last time I died so many times on any single fight. Lots of running away, kiting opponents to fight them one on one. Run, run ,run, sign, whack, whack, run, run, run….you get the idea. Every knight you fight in the prologue is like trying to take out the orc scout before ever going into town in Gothic 2. The prologue very much believes the best way to teach you to swim is to throw you in the water. Well, I drowned, many, many times.
The QTEs are horrible, even the easy ones are just out of place. Left click as fast as possible to crank a ballista? Who came up with that idea and worse, who thought it was a good idea? Who thinks any QTE is a good gameplay mechanic?
Lots and lots of cutscenes, in the prologue at least, I'm starting to feel like I'm playing FF7 here.
Hard to loot items dropped by enemies, the bags that are dropped are hard to get the game to "focus" on so you can loot. Would also be nice if there was a "loot near me" key instead of having it being bound to the quick attack key, that's already happened a lot to me accidently in combat.
I sure hope the story and C&C make up for it once I get out of the prologue, but so far, I'm pretty disappointed. I've read people saying, "Finally, a PC game! It's not a console port!" I'd have to disagree, other than the not limited graphics, it feels very much like a console port in the UI, click spam combat and controls.
