I concur with a couple of points that you made. It does seem the developers either became lazy, or overlooked, the "Press Start" intro to the game. I immediately pressed "Enter", so I did not experience your frustration, but I did find it a little ridiculous, considering the high production value of this game, that something so obviously intended for the console was ignored. I also agree that the field of view is horrendously narrow, almost as if I'm viewing the world through a paper towel roll.
For the most part, though, I am impressed. The graphics have a very smooth, slick style. I did not find the animations to be entirely fluid based on a third person standpoint (the first person animations are superb), but this is multiplayer, after all, and I expected that. The character models themselves are well rendered and detailed, as are the weapon models. I am disappointed in the lack of customization options in the menu. The game offers you three levels of graphical quality, which are so undescriptive and utterly vague, that you basically have to bounce back and forth between the game and the graphic options menu to see the differences. In my experience, there were little differences to be noticed, and I experienced optimal performance at the "Gamer" setting. My hopes are that this was done to keep the graphical quality consistent throughout everyone's playthrough of the demo, and that in the full version, they will offer the option to tweak all details of the graphics to your preference.
The gameplay is quick, but far tamer than a lot of the current mainstream shooters, like Call of Duty. Due to the small number of maximum players allowed (12), it seems far more suited to small maps like Skyline, than Pier 17, which I absolutely dread playing. Most of your time is spent traversing the map, hoping you bump into your enemy, and by that point you're both so surprised that you found each other it ends up being a quick shoot-out without the opportunity to take advantage of your suit abilities. This was my experience, and perhaps others had a different experience, but I hope most of the maps in the full game are at Skyline's scale, or that they allow a greater number of players for maps like Pier 17.
The launch was and still is a complete disaster. My father wanted to try it out, yet it kept telling him he already had an account with his e-mail address, whenever he tried to make one. This is of course impossible, because he does not have an account with EA Games, or Gamespy, and certainly not for the game he has never played before. This happened repeatedly for
two days before it finally created the account for him, and even then it wouldn't log in. He gave up and played it on my account, while I tried to create one for him. It eventually worked, and I was able to create an account for him using my e-mail address. Yet now, both accounts, the one he made and the one I made for him, log in perfectly fine. I myself experienced two hours of being unable to log in on the first day, and yesterday, every server was stuck at the lobby and the matches failed to start. It's been truly hit or miss, with the odds leaning more toward a miss, even after several days.
Still, I enjoy the gameplay, and to me that is the most important part. Graphics I've never really cared much for. I can play older games like Deus Ex that most people simply can't play nowadays due to the lack of pretty graphics. So I'm easily impressed by something like Crysis 2, and I could nitpick, but why? Overall, it looks great. I am looking forward to the full game and the single player. I don't imagine I'll be playing the multiplayer much. But that's not what I'm really looking forward to anyway.
» Sun Jan 09, 2011 10:01 pm 
