Finished it, it's a sprawling monster of a campaign. Not totally sure how I feel, whether I think it's great or just really good. I think it's probably in the top 3 of my favorite game this gen, along with Gears 1 and Reach. Where exactly I'm not sure.
Pop in was well, massive. Of course lighting was just gorgeous though, especially on say, Unsafe Haven. At times it's just sublimely gorgeous. Fire effects are also a high point.
Wish we could see some better endings, I prefer an end boss, preferably a very graphically impressive end boss, and most games now seem to follow the Halo approach of not having an end boss...it's almost a total cliche now imo, gets a bit boring.
The game does a very good job of the old "dark oppressive levels, followed by bright sunny levels" pattern, which always tends to wow graphically and change things up. A simple major color pallet change can really provide a lot of variety in any game.
Also the game does good vehicle sections, as they arent so horribly annoying as 99% of vehicle segments in most games. Heck the last one in the tank on autopilot is even gasp, fun.
I honestly did not notice the bad framerate dipping to ~16 in some firefights, until i read the DF review after I completed the game (being on media blackout). I guess I'm just that insensitive to framerate. Really did not bother me.
As in most FPS, I wouldn't have minded a bit more enemy variety, it's basically the same 6-7 enemy types throughout the entire game. Regular alien, strong red alien, alien heavy, pinger, over and over.
Another issue imo, is the weapons, in that basically the sniper rifle is probably by far the best gun in the campaign. Say, sniper rifle/M60 combo is the best for the whole game, but this gets a little boring. It got so that 3/4 of the way through I started forcing myself to use anything but those two guns, just to feel like I experienced more of the game. However this usually just made the game harder. And I got in a situation late in the game, where I got "stuck" with the gauss cannon and grendel as my weapons after a checkpoint, and both dont carry much ammo, so I kept running out of ammo on that section a few times in a row. And that made me just wish I had never switched off the sniper/M60. The guass cannon for example should be the alpha gun in the game imo, yet it's ammo is so limited it's fairly useless. Same goes for the microwave gun and some others. I like to feel a weapons progression, instead of 1/3 through the game I have the best weapons in the whole game...
But I had one weird graphical issue, in that I experience some faint but definite green "snow" type artifact. Typically in the skies. For example an easy place to see this for me is look at the sky/moon in "Unsafe Haven" (although the sky has this artifact in several levels at least). I got this effect on two monitors so it's not the monitor. At first I thought my 360 GPU might actually be going, but the rest of the game typically seems ok as do a couple other games I tried. Anybody else see this?