A cynical and premature review by Lunaran:

This game does pretty much exactly what's advertised: it's Alien, it's Event Horizon, it's Doom3, it's System Shock 2, with glowing idiot-lights on everything, and for a game that aims to be scary, absolutely nothing is unexpected. You play Isaac "Asimov Arthur C" Clarke, the guy lucky enough to be stuck in the work suit that enables him to push buttons and open doors for everyone else while they stand around impatiently reminding him that he hasn't done it yet.

The story is *exactly* what any of us would predict, and I will describe it here without fear of spoiling anything because it's nothing you haven't heard before: giant ship sends out distress signal and goes quiet, tiny ill-equipped repair shuttle arrives to help out but a totally unexpected disaster strikes and the shuttle crash lands on the ship, stranding everyone. The NPCs all lead the player to a bloodstained room that's divided in half by an impenetrable but very large and clean window, which the player conveniently finds himself locked on the other side of when the beasties come out of the air vents and eat everyone except the important characters that will forever remain separated from the player, where it's easiest to give him explicit instructions on where to go and what to do.

Monsters are defeated not by shooting them in their fat torsoish parts, which does nothing, but instead by dismembering them by shooting them in the shoulders and thighs, which is where all their vital organs apparently are. This would be a lot more fun on the PC imo, where, faced with dozens of monsters, you could just click on the aforementioned parts with your mouse instead of struggling to do it to one or two monsters at a time with two twitchy little sticks. Fortunately, the monsters so far are all nice enough to walk in a bowlegged spread-eagle kind of way to make it nice and easy for you, and if you still fuck it up and they get too close (which I admit I let happen a couple times) you can also just punch their limbs off. Your character is seriously the most badass martial artist in any game yet - you can completely disassemble the corpses of monsters and humans alike by stamping on them (with the ridiculously satisfying curbstomp button).

Similarities to Doom3 are almost hilariously common: the guis with lots of diagonal shapes, the semi-useless audio logs of scared whiny people who express frantic concern before being audibly eaten alive, a tram, the shadow that moves at the end of the hall, the bodies that stand up when you get close enough, monsters that only crawl on the ceiling in their canned intro cinematics and then never do it again, and of course the environments. If you still pop a stiffy from space-tech themes, this game should keep you happy for a while, but don't expect anything terribly new conceptually.

You do, however, have a flashlight on your gun (don't celebrate yet) and the only way to see in the dark is to raise your gun and thus go into extra slow walk mode (see I told you).

That said I still kind of want to keep playing because, as brimming with cliche as this game is, I'm still a sucker for this stuff. 

there's monster closets and monsters sometimes appear behind you. No idea how I forgot to put those on the list. 

Now I can continue to feel smug for boycotting EA games. 

having only watched Lunaran play the game, I will mention the horribly cliched setting is at least pretty, with some nice colored lighting choices. Plus, you can curbstomp crates, which I believe made Lun far more giddy then it should've. 

We had a demo of it at work today. I was not impressed. You could easily predict when the body would rise up in front of you, when you would open a door and a corpse would fall from the ceiling, etc etc.

The combat looks ridiculous. The puzzles look ridiculous. The monsters looks ridiculous (I've only seen two so far though.) The game just looks ridiculous. I could go on about weapons, level design, characters, etc. The whole thing just feels like a glorified haunted house, and it feels very game-y. I didn't feel any immersion whatsoever.

Red space barrels what explode when you shoot them and are placed in convenient areas to dispose of multiple enemies? Check.

I was kind of looking forward to it, but I will probably not be picking this thing up. 

so if you just press it over and over you can walk down a hallway pretending to be a big dinosaur 

I have clearly misjudged this game. 

Do the Dinosaur Walk for 100feet. 

ROFBBQMAO. 

:D 

But I'll need friends to play it. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSSHqNicKSs 

is it full of copy protection spyware rootkit trojans? 

Get it from steam. 

started to get annoying, then it got worse. I kind of just want to be fucking done with it already.

megaman, your continued paranoiac terror of absolutely everything on the internet continues to amuse me. when are you going to completely snap and go off the grid? 

Where you at Lun? I'm finishng up island 3 and still find it amusing, almost wish the puzzles were a bit harder though. 

So we've gone from world changing experience, to annoying, to just wanting to be fucking done with it. Sounds awesome! 

that made me laugh out loud :D

maybe it's because i know a lot of stuff :P

xss that takes over your badly configured router? check. xss that acts as a proxy so the attacker can use your line for requests? check. [...] 

Every time they teach you a new goo type you use it for like two puzzles and then it's on to the next new thing. The concepts are never built upon or exploited, so instead they have to ramp up difficulty by making every puzzle a new gimmick like "NOW build a tower on a tilty platform that heaves your entire wobbly painstaking creation into the lava at the slightest provocation" instead of exploring where the depth really is.

I quit last night because I finally got my balloon-driven goo tiltawhirl thing to lean over to the pipe the right way, but it stopped in exactly the wrong spot for the pipe to start vaccuuming, but still close enough for all the remaining goo to want to jump to the pipe, so I thought I had finally beaten the level and instead was treated to the sight of every last one of my gooballs leaping gleefully to their deaths. fuck off world of goo. 

"Why aren't any of you playing World of Goo yet? This game is awesome. I stayed up far too late last night playing it without realizing - it's one of those games.

The puzzle design and the types of goo are so far extremely awesome, and the game has a very tongue in cheek sense of humor about itself. Intensely cute and squeezable on the surface, but there's an underlying note of sad mystery that really pulls you along, wondering where the bizarre Burtonesque story of these gooballs is going.

I want to play it right now, but I have to wait."

:P 

It is cute, but after seeing wobbly-bobbly eyes for more than 10 minutes you might want to pinch them. The sounds are cute too but after a while each "weeeee! woooooo!" and "bloolooobloobiboo?" makes me wanna hit the monitor. Not to mention the dumpa-dumpa-dumpa 20 second "music" loop (is it my imagination or is the sound compressed as fuck? I really get a headache from it.) that is full-on ear and brain penetration.
The art style ranges from "oh nice" over "lol <3 *snugglez u* deviantart-emo" to "please let me kill that thing".
The tongue in cheek humour might be ok if it was done occasionally and well (anyone remember how fantastic the Monkey Island series did this?) but it seems the whole concept of the game is "lol we are so > lololol that we are totally awesome and indie and shit".
The levels were either boring or frustrating so far. The one I am at (Red Carpet) took me several attempts to even figure out what to do because there was no fucking visual feedback on some thing (you'll know if you play(ed) it) suggesting the first idea that comes to mind won't work. But then it does, hohoho.

All in all, play random free puzzle games, you won't miss anything. That being said, just one more level, then I quit. 

It is cute, but after seeing wobbly-bobbly eyes for more than 10 minutes you might want to pinch them. The sounds are cute too but after a while each "weeeee! woooooo!" and "bloolooobloobiboo?" makes me wanna hit the monitor. Not to mention the dumpa-dumpa-dumpa 20 second "music" loop (is it my imagination or is the sound compressed as fuck? I really get a headache from it.) that is full-on ear and brain penetration.
The art style ranges from "oh nice" over "lol <3 *snugglez u* deviantart-emo" to "please let me kill that thing".
The tongue in cheek humour might be ok if it was done occasionally and well (anyone remember how fantastic the Monkey Island series did this?) but it seems the whole concept of the game is "lol we are so > lololol that we are totally awesome and indie and shit".
The levels were either boring or frustrating so far. The one I am at (Red Carpet) took me several attempts to even figure out what to do because there was no fucking visual feedback on some thing (you'll know if you play(ed) it) suggesting the first idea that comes to mind won't work. But then it does, hohoho.

All in all, play random free puzzle games, you won't miss anything. That being said, just one more level, then I quit. 

My opinion of the game changed the more I played it. Why is that unusual? The first half of the game presented a lot of character and opportunity for depth that the second half didn't bring to fruition.

My opinion of you keeps changing, too. 

I love watching people get sucked into hype and then having the joy crushed from their bodies, spraying from every available orifice. It pleases me. 

I'm nearing the end and I'm not nearly as negative about it as Lun and Spirit. I still think it's funny and fun (yeah those are 2 different things). I agree that they could have pushed the puzzles further, they all feel fairly easy to me and never really posed much of a challenge.