The main story line anyway. At some point I stopped caring for any side missions and just tried to get through as quickly as possible. I found the game pretty boring to be honest. It's fun for the first few hours, but then it's basically just more of the same, with no variation and highlights. Just drive around and kill someone or destroy something on the other side of the map, then return and do pretty much the same mission for the rival faction. At least there were some nice-looking spots (e.g. that village)
I couldn't care less for the story - it felt shallow and tacked-on. None of the player's actions seem to have any impact.
A pity, as the game has some potential which isn't properly made use of. Or maybe I expected too much.

I found Uzi/silenced MP5+sniper riffle+heavy machinegun to be a good weapon combo, btw.
Also, the only game I played with subtitles on. :P 

The intro is delicious!
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?story=55686 

that looks fantastic 

Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. I just got done with the 2nd barge mission, kind of struggling to continue on. It was really cool at first, but somehow turned into Assassin's Creed: Africa more or less.

Also, hate how you can't stop certain things from happening, even though your reputation with those people is super high. 

L4D! 

It was pretty damn good. I was unimpressed with the storyline and some of the poorly conceived set pieces, but the meat of the game is a fine, atmospheric shooter set in some of the best tech-themed environments I've seen.

Combat is tense, careful, and somewhat idiosyncratic. Instead of sprinting around blasting stuff, you stand your ground and place planes on damage into the enemy as they charge you. It works well, and the rather gory results are very satisfying.

There are mouse control issues, silly bits and endless shameless wallowing in cliche, but I enjoyed the heck out of this game. 

Fucking good game, very good visuals, nice concept, nice details, mega map are awesome !!.. Only complain, finger combos needed for playre control... took me some time to understand how it worked..;
I have now to finish it, and buy another PC that will support high resolution mode... 

Assassin's Creed starts out good. But the game gets fucking repetitive as hell.

ALL of the missions are identical to the first one. So you basically play the same damn thing 9 times (or however many times it takes you to beat the game.)

I think I'm on mission 5, and I just got bored of doing the same thing time and time again. The gameplay wasn't good enough to support that. 

Maybe you're right as I just progressed till Damascus, and just enter the city... but in anyway, it was quite good... Well, if it is as repetitive as you said, I understand your point of view, however, the fact you can explore many areas of the map, is IMHO very good... and if you take your time exploring, I think you can find something out cool... though... 

It'd be better if they had more of those free-running missions. If you haven't had one yet, those are pretty good. You have to run around following a stream of flags to collect. Those are pretty good missions simply because they capitalize on the strengths of the game - mainly the free running and exploring parts of the game instead of the combat, stalking, etc. If they had more of those it might have kept my interest longer. 

 

1st of all I was quite happy to find that it runs fairly well on my ageing system (2.8ghz single core, 8800gts, 2gb ram) on medium settings, while still looking very acceptable! Its not fantastic but pretty much a constant 25-35 fps and no loading pauses.

Weapons feel nice and meaty, good explosions and sound effects.

The African theme is great, and incorporates tropical, desert and savannah themed areas into a large open world.

Missions are simple but effective, go here and kill this variety, but leave it up to you how you go about it, much like the original Far Cry. The annoying thing is that usually the objective is on the other side of the world from you no matter what you end up accepting. I dont mind a quick drive to complete missions but its quite annoying to have to drive for 10 minutes to do every single mission.

The weapon unlock and armoury thing is pretty nicely done and encourages you to go out and explore to find diamonds. The annoying thing is that once you've expended your ammo for your Uber weapons you have to pick up some shitty ak47 to complete the rest of the mission, unless your lucky enough to find replacement ammo or another arms dealer close to your objective.

The way fire spreads is very cool, but using it as an actual aid during gameplay seems to take a back seat 90% of the time.

Not tried the editor yet, but I've seen some vids of it and it looks fantastic! 

Love it!

http://d.imagehost.org/0626/scampiefo3.jpg

Where else can you be a business man cowboy?

http://d.imagehost.org/0403/minigunsun.jpg

Where else can you sit atop a hill, watching the sun set with your minigun?

http://d.imagehost.org/0298/gunslotsofguns.jpg

Where else can you find an insane amount of guns in an old military building?

http://d.imagehost.org/0200/lolcows.jpg

And where else, pray tell, can you meet a playboy with a two headed cow head with party hats? 

I agree: having more open area with more free-running mission, like getting rewards the more you explorate the map would have been better.. In anyway, the game is visually really impressive. The eagle eye on top of the towers is really cool. Maybe more combo in fights would have been better, while on PC it is a nightmare to handle the player... you need at least 11 fingers :P
Anyway, I understand better why it has been so well ranked when the game has been released: it is really worth playing, while repetitive... 

Were sciencey and complex. It was dumbed down.
http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/8555.page;jsessionid=5E18EDA69A5B21F41A40CB066DA3C5F0.240061 

yeah fallout3 is great, despite some flaws (I can live with wooden anims, but UI design and some controls are pretty bad) And being less RPG than originals its still much more than a shallow sandbox game(Asscreed etc). Its a huge post-apocal world with tonn of fun to be had. And you can play it just like an FPS. 

and to add to the earlier animations comment:

it's not that the animations themselves are bad (although some really are that bad) but that the method which they move the models is extremely poor.

it's basically the same system i remember from morrowind. something simple like pressing forward and strafing makes your character slide to the side instead of properly orienting the legs and hips. it's just really old tech for such a big-name game. also, the speed at which the model moves isn't related to the actual animation at all.
they added IK, which is nice, but they didn't follow through and integrate the IK into the movement speed. hell, even Doom3, which is a pretty old game these days used the actual animation to determine how far to move the model.
when i look at the extremely well done and well integrated animation and movement of say, mass effect, it really pisses me off to go back like 6 years to morrowind style movement/animation. 

Where the character has an extra bone which is moved inside the animation, so the animator moves the character the distance they would really be moving - the code reading the displacement of the extra bone as the movement speed.

Works really well. 

That's been around since half-life days, where the game code decides how fast the player should move, and then calculates how far into the next frame the animation should interpolate to match. 

hell, even Doom3, which is a pretty old game these days used the actual animation to determine how far to move the model.

yes :( 

made me assume that Oblivion looked kinda crappy... ?

Still Fo3 doesn't look that crappy from the videos and stuff. And the combat looks cool. Gimmicky but entertaining? 

Has anyone else preordered and got early access to the demo?

If so we should sort out a few 4 player "squads" so we are not playing with raving 14 year old idiots ;) 

Yup, I'm in! 

really enjoying this so far. First game I've played that starts with you being born in a first person view. But not the last for sure! I'll probably post a full review when I actually get somewhere.