good game.

There was a boredom factor for me as well though. Maybe it was just too linear. Not much choice for the player; you're pretty much led from A to B and that's it. If you replay it, you're again led from A to B in the same manner.

I like the leech gun, that was a pretty cool concept.

Would have liked a lot more of the Native American stuff and more character development. There was a series of spiritual tests announced, but they never came. The death game became boring fast; I prefer checkpoints with optional quickloading.

A lot of cool scenes in the game like the school bus. It didn't always come together very well; it felt like cool bits strung together instead of a cohesive theme.

Wtf were those little girls doing in there. Their backstory was totally lost on me. It was like "you're swarmed by creepy little girls now because the designer fancied it" and next level, the little girls were gone again. What the...

It also suffered from darkness like Doom3 and Quake 4.

Plus, I didn't like Jen. I'm supposed to save a girlfriend who just screams all the time? :-/

They should have given Jen a gun and allowed the player to play as her for a while, exploring a different area of the sphere. 

Weapons look very underwhelming, shotgun in particular. I hope that's only SOME of the weapons. 

Yeah Jen has got to be the ugliest princess that needs saving in any game ever. Her head was far too wide for the face. Even Princess Toadstool is hotter. I'd rather have screwed the mutant mother bitch at the end, at least she had her tits out already. 

elastomania for sailors: http://bloboats.blobtrox.net/ 

quite enjoyable so far.

movement is about on par with modern shooters, fairly slow. it's the unreal engine so movement and direction changes are crisp and responsive. for some reason, you can jump about 3 meters in the air. alien planet so low gravity? i dunno, it's weird but actually necessary because most places where you are required to jump are quite far. this also means that there's a LOT of clipping going on to stop you from leaving the map.
fov is very small, but you can change it back to 90.

visual are gorgeous. it's not crysis 2, but it's not trying to be. it's like madmax with world of warcraft art style. if the character models had solid coloured textures, you might mistake them for team fortress 2.

pretty repetitive with enemies though. there's bandits and animals somewhat like fiends and birds.
there are many variations of bandits though, and each type is quite distinctive and much more than just a reskin. you rarely have to look at the name of the mob to tell what kind it is.
append: i just remembered there were these worms that you had to shoot in the eye to kill and the second area i just entered had these slug things that remind me of the film "Tremors". so maybe things are looking up for monster variety.

as far as i can tell, the core gameplay is identical for all 4 player characters. you can use any gun you want, contrary to what the instruction booklet and character descriptions imply. the only thing is some of the talents you pick up later via talent points (1 per level after level 5) only boost certain weapon types, but it's not like you can't use any weapon if you wanted to.

as for the 'role playing' aspect, it's really just 'stat buiding' ala diablo. it's even less than that, really.
you get the aforementioned talent points to spend but there are no traditional rpg stats like str, dex and con. there's a simple 'learn by doing' system for the weapons. the more kills you get with a certain weapon, the more you go up in weapon skill levels and you start to accrue tiny bonuses like +2% damage or +5% reduced reload time or somesuch.

finally, each character only gets a single special ability.

hunter gets a pet bird that you can send out to beat on guys. it's effective, but goofy. i'm not a huge fan of 'pets'. i like to kill my own stuff.

soldier gets a turret you can plop down that also can give you ammo and does a decent job of killing stuff. this guy feels like he was built specifically for coop and so feels somewhat... i dunno, out of sorts in solo.

'siren' (talk about unhelpful class name) spawns an explosion then turns invisible and then spawns another explosion when reappearing. this is more useful than it sounds. you can use the explosions to knock out groups of enemies more accurately than grenades and also very helpful for running away if stumble on some mob 10 levels higher than you.

berserker is... well, you punch stuff insanely hard and you heal and become invulnerable. i didn't use this guy very long. i hate meleeing in a shooter and this kind of thing is boring to me.

so yeah, the differentiation between the classes is a lot more subtle than their visual differentiation.

anyway, will see how it goes in the second area... 

Certain classes did better with different guns. Soldiers did good with automatics, sirens did good with snipers (? maybe), etc. I may be talking out of my rear, though. Check the wiki.

Also, i wouldn't say the art style is like WoW, at all really, their both cartoony, but it pretty much ends there. I forget what the name of the art style used in borderlands is, i know warsow uses the same style, though. 

 

you need to look at the textures and the way they are made. you'll see the similarities with wow's texture art.
the game could have worked just as well without the comic book black outline effect. the textures are that strong.

and yeah, like i said, you can use any gun, but some classes' talents only boost one damage type (for example, soldier has one that boosts only shotguns).
siren's talents are more generalized as many boost her actual ability, and others boost elemental procs (+fire, +acid, +electricity) which are present on all types of weapons. 

I bought the zombie island and mad moxxie dlc and haven't even played them yet. :( 

If we can get some coop going on I might join in. I didn't like the sp at all but maybe coop is better. 

Coop was a lot more fun. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttx959sUORY

Looks hell fucking awesome 

That was incredible. Maybe a decent game will be made with this version? 

And came back saying that the demo was real time ... but it was basically running on a super computer. You wouldn't get that on the average computer today, and you wouldn't be able to get that on XBox360 or PS3, but possibly next gen consoles. 

Maybe that will be a new game. They said it hasn't gone past a tech demo, but Gears of war was originally just a tech demo and then turned into a full game.

Yeah the system they ran it on had 3 GTX580's... ffs. However if you started a game now, it wouldn't be ready for a couple years anyway, by which time GTX580's will be cheap. And they did say it'd be fine on just 1 GTX580.


I wouldn't mind if that was their next game, at least it's better than realistic war shooters. 

son yeah its enjoyable in a sandbox kind of way (not my thing generally) but it gets pretty repetitive too IMHO. Although the plains of Africa look great, I would love for a change of environment sometime soon. 

I like the ending, I hope he got pwnd. 

nice lighting and fog and sweat, but it looks like just another game where you headshot people and fight giant robots to me.

I think the detailed violence in some recent games (Crysis 2 breaking necks, anyone) is really a bit over the top. Games do not get automatically better when guts drop on the floor, brains hit the wall or jaws are ripped off. It's pretty cheap actually.

Apart from that, gameplay plz?

And if there was a jab at Brink in there, I'm just going to say I'm 300% more likely to buy Brink. 

Yeah if I remember right this video was to show off the new dx11 support in UE3, and I believe they have added the dx11 effects into UDK now also, although I could be mistaken.

Sure doe's look great though, lol about the 3x GTX 580's however... Maybe in another 5-6 years we will see games that actually look like that, its not like id or crytek are making gpu-melting engines any more :P 

I'll be honest. I love the way that Doom baddies turn into mush. I dont think Quake ever managed to succesfully reproduce that. What I dont like is over-large QTE-style anims which take too long (AVP anyone?) 

Violence is satisfying, but when you get to God of War levels, you have to start feeling your hobby is just a bit fucked up :P 

It has to be the end of a range.

A Quake example: Gibbing is rarely seen and can be difficult to do since you're not supposed to be quadrocketing shamblers or rocketing grunts. So its 'rare' that you see the bits and pieces fly although theres still the standard death sequence.

With cutom maps and veteran players who save their rockets for this sort of thing this doesn't make much of a difference - gibbing has become frequent.

My point is that gibbing isn't constant. You can barely go a single fight without some monster losing its organs in GoW. Which completely takes the satisfaction out of it.

It's not the goreporn I like, but achieving something. If thats tied into splattering a monster across the wall then so be it. 

Interesting one. Has to fit the subject matter, theme, atmosphere and tone of the game IMO.

L4D2 is the goriest game I've played and it is pretty bloody gory - blood, limbs, innards and hacked up corpses fly everywhere. It's grim but great, cos it's zombies, so it feels appropriate. Worth it's 18 rating tho.

Funnily enough, playing Bioshock recently, I found Ryan's death scene in that, although much much less gory, to be far more traumatic due to the way it was presented. One of the harshest things I've seen in a game. 

nice lighting and fog and sweat, but it looks like just another game where you headshot people and fight giant robots to me.

What about the innovative cigarette-butt-enrages-enemies aggro management mechanic? It works on guys with helmets, and giant robots! 

Looked like it would be a cool game right up to the point where he showed 'teh super powers lol'

oooh dark stealthy potential Deus Ex type... oh no, just beating shit up, oh well.

But why am I complaining about a tech demo