Played through the demo on a Core 2 Duo E6300, 2048MB RAM (DDR-400), XFX GeForce 7950GT 512MB AGP, Win XP w/ 94.24 XFX drivers (the new nVidia beta drivers that were released today once again don't support 79xx AGP cards).
Performance was great most of the time in 1280x1024 with all visual eye candy enabled. It stuttered a little and got a little choppy when there was a lot of stuff going on but overall it was acceptable.
I liked pretty much everything about the demo so maybe it's easier to focus on the "bad" stuff
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The first thing I found pretty weird was that the character did not say a word. After the plane crash he managed to get back to the surface and we can hear him breathing hard, gasping for air but he doesn't say a thing? Huh? And it seems even weirder that he doesn't say anything when he discovers the lighthouse and the entrance to Rapture. A good old fashioned "What the fuck?" would have seemed
very appropriate here
. OK, maybe it will all make sense in the end if/when we find out that our character is not human or something but it's just kinda strange that the guy doesn't react to these crazy events/discoveries at all. Definitely could have used some Prey-like comments to make it seem more real and less awkward.
Another thing that I am slightly disappointed in is that the credibility of the world could have been better. There are invisible walls that are holding you back from going to places that you can see. You barely take any damage from fire. And whenever there is a leak then the water pours in like mad but the water level doesn't rise at all. Those leaks would have maybe been the perfect opportunity to create a sense of urgency to get your butt in gear and move on but I guess that they thought otherwise.
On the interface and interaction side it might have been nice to have a real inventory where you can store your picked up stuff instead of the instant consumption/usage of everything that is lying around somewhere.
And finally on the technical side, I think they have set a new record for loading times. Luckily you don't have to reload on death but you just respawn at the nearest shrine ummm... vita thingie, I mean
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I also got some sound crackling though I'm not sure if this is due to the retro theme of the game (read: intended) or a real sound issue.
Well, and being a non-native English speaker I turned on subtitles and found out that they need some polishing because they are not synced with the voices. What's nice is that you can replay every(?) dialogue and radio message so it's not a big deal and I turned subtitles off again very quickly.
Other than these fairly minor issues it looks like a great game that is 100% FPS (as advertised). The atmosphere is great, the enemies are pretty wild, the setting is making you curious to move on and to get further into the story, the hacking mini game is a lot of fun, ... it's all good. Bring it on
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