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. 

i'm still really enjoying the game too. i think that's what pisses me off even more. this game is so close to perfect on what i was looking for. 

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.

I forgot to say, I completely agree. At first you think it's just bad animation cycles (although I wouldn't say they're stellar) but it really seems like the speed of animation and speed of movement are almost always out of sync. In all seriousness, I wouldn't say it's a significant improvement on morrowind anims. 

Atleast there is half decent lip-sync - what worries me more is a CTD near the start when I pick the lock to the overseers office. Damn... 

hmm... if you can't get round that, there is a key. Might require a slightly immoral course of action though. Ahem. 

1st impressions after playing a few full rounds online.

+ Shotgun is meaty, and can take out 5-6 zombies with 1 shot if your lucky.

+ Zombies animations are absolutely fucking amazing, its totally convincing when a bunch of them come at you from around the corner, also the ragdoll effect when they die is possibly the most realistic ragdoll effect I have seen in a game. Hey look here Bethesda! :P

+ Boss infected work really well, I particularly like the Witch, as some idiot 14 year old I was playing with thought it would be funny to run up to her and shoot her in the face, she proceeded to rip him to shreds while we all laughed!

+ Co-op gameplay! It just works brilliantly here, you can see where all your team mates are even through walls as silhouettes, and your characters automatically shout to the rest of your team when they see a boss infected, or are reloading. You are also warned when one of your team mates is taking a pounding so you can try and rescue them.

+ "Play with friends" online option is a godsend, if you host then only your steam friends can join, which as Vondur so eloquently put it so many years ago, this "removes morons out the way".

- Game levels are a little under-detailed in my opinion, but im guessing they needed to pull the detail down a notch as they cannot gauge how many zombies are going to be in an area at any time.

- Most boss infected die too easily I think, smokers and hunters can be taken out with a few shots, all the other bosses are fine however. It may be that each time I played my entire team focus fired the bosses as soon as they appeared...

- I'm sure this is because the demo servers are getting hammered to death right now, but 8/10 times when starting a round the server will disconnect or time-out. Very frustrating!

Loving it so far, now excuse me I must play a few more rounds ;) 

awesome 

This game fucking rocks. That's really the only coherent thing I can say at the moment about the game without going overboard on the gushing. 

Is quite cool yes, the demo is painfully short though, can't wait to play the rest of the maps! 

Downloading . . .

Steam name ijed, though I'm probably online at odd times. 

Valve makes the rest of the industry look foolish. Even if connecting fails constantly.

Alot my reaction is 'why isn't it normally like this?'

Weapons that do realistic damage, for example.

Keep looking for quicksave as well.

I wouldn't say smokers / boomers are even meant as bosses, just variants - its their attacks that are the danger, not an invisible bullet proof vest.

The witch nearly got me first time as well :P 

Been playing it some more... (lots more!)

+ The levels do actually differ in layout slightly on each playthrough, I have noticed that sometimes a wall has a hole in it that leads to another part of the map, while in a later game on the same map the wall is intact, forcing you to take a different route.

+ Play on advanced/expert difficulty! Normal is just too easy in its current state, and I end up just running around shooting everything because I know I can get away with it, on advanced/expert mode you really do need to stick with your team and cover each other all the time, and it makes the whole experience work much better.

+ Valve released a few bug fixes for the matchmaking system and server setups, so it is a lot smoother now. Not quite where it needs to be yet, but certainly a step in the right direction.

+ I found the option in the in-game menu called "take a break" that puts your character in cpu control so you can go for a piss or whatever without fucking over your entire team, very nice insight there!

This game really does just keep getting better and better the more I play it :) 

Yeah, I expect Normal difficulty will ramp up more in later maps, but for these 2 maps, it's best to just try at first to get used to the game, then it's all about Advanced/Expert for some actual fun.

And be sure to kick idiots on Expert who run off and get themselves killed, they just fuck your team.