Well, I've played the demo for a bit. The "rendering" and "screen" res was confusing at first, of course I pumped up the rendering res to 2048*2048, thinking it had something to do with textures (duh). My 64 meg GF4 4200 didn't seem to like that too much.
But with a screen res of 1280*1024, and a rendering res of 1024*512, it runs very well and looks pretty good on my XP1800/GF4 rig, which certainly isn't a monster these days (what was the framerate of the PS2 version, btw? From videos on X-Play a few days ago it looks to be mostly 30fps). Mouse control is OK, you can tell it's hacked joypad control as it's not nearly as precise as you would expect, but it still operates well enough - this isn't an FPS of course. I'll probably end up playing with a gamepad, that is if I ever get into it.
Graphics-wise, the main character is
extremely impressive, but my same criticism from the PS2 screens exist when they appeared, in that (like a lot of PS2 games I've seen), the attention is applied to the main character and little else. Textures and world complexity are severely lacking, no doubt getting it to look this good with the PS2's limited memory was a feat, but some of the background textures look like they came from a Quake2-era game. The dark & gritty (or rather..."messy") appearance of the environment mask this somewhat though, you can get away with poorer textures in this game as opposed to one that's supposed to be accurately reflecting a real-world environment that's at least somewhat sterile.
That's not to say it looks
bad, it certainly doesn't - the lighting effects largely overcome any small criticisms I may have about the background textures. Some aspects are very impressive, others definitely remind me I'm playing a PS2 port (and what the heck is with the fonts? Couldn't they have changed that for the PC release?).
Definitely freaky though...not sure about the gameplay at this point, never been a big fan of survival horror games, but the 2D control system (selectable in options) really helps here - can't stand the Resident-Evil style control system. Unfortuantely it appears the demo is very short, so I'm not sure how much of a feel I'm going to get from it.
But on the port-side, it seems to be fine to me. Runs quite well on my aging rig with
reasonable settings, looks better than the PS2 version, decent selection of control options. If you're expecting to run a console port with a 2048*2048 backbuffer + AA, even on a 9800 Pro - then I think the problem is with your expectations folks, not with the coding job.