I really like the game now, at first I fought with the control (it was more like as were fighting with the controller as I had play on console for a while) but now that I'm used I'm sold.
The game is entertaining that for sure, I would even it's almost "casual" as I managed to have my wife to jump in! She was really showing cold feet here but once she tried she got really caught in the game.
The fact that you mostly only focus on one analogue stick at a time makes it easier for new comers.
We're 2/3 into the game (difficulty recrue) and I'm sure that we will replay it and that she will enjoy to play horde too. Really happy here to be able to share some time with her (it proved impossible with some other games like the RE5 demo).
Still I have some griefs against the game. I've no complain with the core game mechanic, I experience really few bugs and the cover system is really solid. In fact I still have few games but out of all the demo I tried I think that it's the shooting mechanic I like the most. Really great and entertaining.
So my main complains.
*During sp campaign the frame rate is pretty solid, not a huge complain here but I think it could have been better. In coop (split screen) the frame rate drop consistantly it affects gameplay that's for sure, it's far from a deal/fun breaker but it bothers me (my wife couldn't care less...).
Clearly I would prefer a more smoother experience even at the cost of decreased overall IQ. Epic didn't dare to implement this, anyway I've the feeling that they has been seriously lacking time more on that later.
*I also noticed that in coop my squad seems to act dumbier, it could be an impression but I noticed it. The same in SP once I started to play music from my usb key Dom all suddently start to act way dumbier. I think that Epic must have hit serious cpu limitations.
*There is also something that bother in regard to the overall looks of the game, there is some constant "shimmering" going on and the game clearly lacks AA even if edge detect helps (more on this later).
*I also think that the game is clearly missing huge/epic boss battle, once again I think that Epic has clearly miss time and it comes in line with what some online players (I don't play online) had stated at launch in regard to MP/horde.
That's pretty much a lot of complains in regard to title that I enjoy a lot (and I will clearly buy the fisrt iteration)
It appears that most of my concerns with the game are tied to how the UE engine works. There is no question that the game looks really good but GeoW II and so UE III supposely the pinnacle of what the 360 can do if anything doesn't play on the strength of the 360 hardware (Ok I konw it's the internet as its worse as I don't qualify to have a proper opinion in this regard). I clearly question some Epic choices.
The game looks clearly cpu limited in some situation the engine still doesn't support tiling and instead use edge detection which basically trades bandwidth on the GPU side for CPU cycles. It's a pretty odd choice (especcially if you think about some gamefest presentation about most games being already cpu limited and the bandwidth available throught the edram). I know it has to do with the way UE3 handles shadows but Epic works (and not only for themselves) on the 360 for 3 years now they should have found a workaround or implement another shadowing technic (some games using UE3 seems to support fullscreen AA).
I'm also wondering if Epic in GeoWII could be using the enlighten engine from Geomeric for the lighning. Geomeric lighning engine runs on one hardware thread on the 360 (a SPU in the ps3). Xenon can run 6 hardware threads, 2 are already taken by the OS and the "main game thread" if enlighten engine is used then Epic is left with 3 hardware threads to deal with all remaining task. Once again trading CPU cycles for Vram bandwidth is odd. I wonder if it's one of the reason for the AI problems I faced (see ealier).
I tried to guess how cpu ressources could be shared among the three xenon cores:
core0:
Thread1: main game thread
thread2: task based
core1:
thread3: enlighten
thread4: task based
core2:
thread5: OS
thread6: task based
Basically rendering, decompression, AI, animation could be handled in task based fashion maybe with some priorities. I wonder if squad members AI could be considered low prioirty handle and every time the OS thread need some few( really few) extra juice the balance is broken and the AI take the hit (could be true wether or not enlighten is used).
I don't know if GeoW II really use enlighten but I think that while on the ps3 stealing a SPU may not hurt (so much untapped power here on most games) securing one thread on the xenon is a huge hit.
Other than that I think that Epic may have consider to lower the resolution to overcome whatever limitation they are facing on the GPU side, I mean due to DOF background are already blurry (in a nice fashion tho) so the drop in resolution would have go unnoticed there. On the more vivsible part of the scenery I'm sure that the loss in IQ would have been easily compensated by real AAx2 and they may have user the power freed by dealing by less pixels by pumping the vertex load I mean environments could use more geometry.
