Ok, here are my impressions. I didn't see anyhing NDA related in the agreement plan, so I figure I'm safe. Very, very long, but I hope it gives everyone an idea of what this game is so far. I looked at all the agreements at the beginning and I don't seem to see anything NDA related, so here goes. Warning, it's a long one.
MOTION CONTROLS: They are tight, responsive, and best of all, customizable. You can choose the sensitivity of the tilt, to give it the hard rock at a hair trigger or a nice gentle hand barely gliding around.
It takes some getting used to, to be sure, and the general lightness of the SIXAXIS make it hard to get a feel for, because it's so easy to over correct. You can turn them off completely and just play with the analog sticks, which is nice, but it limits you. True to what the developers said, it takes a lot of work to get good with the motion, but when you do, you get REALLY good.
For one thing, it allows you to free up the left stick for movement of your target reticule independent of your plane. It gives your aim a lot more room, and makes it really hard for someone to shake you. Again, it takes some practice, because you have to train your brain to basically pilot two separate things on screen at once.
As far as EVERYTHING controls (on foot, ground vehicles, Warhawks...) everything is tight, fast paced, easy to pick up. Aside from learning to fly and independently aim, there is practically no learning curve as far as the controls are concerned. And even that you don't have to do if you don't want to. You can still be quite effective as a killing machine using only the analog sticks.
GRAPHICS: Simply awesome. The character models that got made fun of really aren't as bad as you'd think. Big feet vs. Gears of War's impossibly large shoulders. What the hell, it makes it unique.
The move great, and seem to have an actual weight behind them. They don't just glide over the ground when you run, and if you run backwards or sideways, you can actually see them hop a bit to keep moving, same as a person would.
The textures are all nice and lively, and the only "Brown is Next Gen" level is one that is a war-torn, bomb gutted city that is perpetually on fire. It fits the atmosphere of that level. Other levels, like the one most played, takes place in a "Far Cry" like pair of islands, full of jungles and underbrush to hide in, and connected by two bridges that act as major choke points in "Zone" games (more on that later.) The map is bright, colorful, and just full of places to hide. That includes the clouds, incidentally. Big puffy masses that are easily flown into and can mask your target signature. It won't shake a missile off your tail, but I have flown into it and turned on my hover, and lost quite a few pursuers that just fly by not knowing where I went.
All over the maps, there are destructible objects waiting to be... Well, destroyed. Park benches, thin trees, street lamps... Whatever. There are completely invulnerable trees, of course, but what can you do? Hanging around your base is nice, because you have access to all the firepower it provides, but one well placed machine gun burst could take out half your team, thanks to the tons of explosive piles of junk laying around. Missiles on racks waiting to be loaded, O2 welding tanks, fuel barrels... Just don't stand near them during a firefight, trust me. I blew up two jeeps and a hovering Warhawk with one grenade earlier tonight. It was the highlight of my day, I'll tell you that..
The planes all look superb, and the red team's (whatever their name is, I don't even remember anymore) Warhawks just look plain scary. It's like you took a stealth bomber, gave it hover jets and fans, and made it look like a manta ray.
As someone said, customization is kind of... Limited at this point. You see the options for imported logos for uniforms and decals on vehicles, but they are disabled for Beta purposes. Right now, you have the choice of two different looks per side. Before you jump into the plane, it looks its standard color (black for the red team, army green for the blue team.) After you jump in, it has a cool morphing effect where it changes to "your" planes color, paint job, and eventually will take on decals and other personalization marks. It's going to be pretty cool to see tailored squadrons flying about.
The only texture that doesn't look great the water, but that's only when up close, as from the air or just driving by it looks incredible. But lapping up on shore, it looks to be just a standard, mercury like substance with no transparency. Incidentally, don't get to close, because water in the Warhawk universe kills on touch No swimming to the next island here, folks, better catch a ride..
WEAPONS: Oh, the glorious, glorious weapons. Not many of them, and not anything you haven't had before, but hell of a lot of fun to play with. Very satisfying.
First off, you start out with two frag grenades, a one-hit kill knife, and a pistol. Grenades are a little difficult, because they explode practically on impact, so there isn't much bouncing around corners. The knife is effective, and easier to use than you might think. Hold the trigger, it will lock onto your target, so when you get close all you have to do is tap the trigger again to gut your enemy from stomach to neck.
The pistol is godly, folks. It has infinite ammo, is crazy accurate at short to medium ranges, and fires as fast as you can tap the trigger. I can't tell you how many times I get in close and abandon my machine gun for the handy, dandy pistol to score a couple headshots and clear my zone.
There are more weapons available for pick up, glowing various colors so you can see what they are from a distance. Kind of arcady, but it actually doesn't bother you as much as you'd think in a game this fast paced.
The flamethrower doesn't really set things alight so much as put out a solid stream of damage shaped like a cone in front of you. Your opponents don't stay on fire, but they usually won't stay alive long enough for that to matter. Machine gun works like a rapid fire pistol, but crouching is necessary to get any decent accuracy out of it. This makes you kind of slow, but you dish out damage by the truck load. The rocket launcher is great, because it acts as your general "anti-anything" weapon. Shoot a vehicle, shoot a person, even hold the trigger for a second and it will lock on that pesky Warhawk perched above raining down machine gun fire and drop half it's health in a single shot.
There are other small arms weapons like the insanely powerful sniper rifle, but the only other one of serious note are the binoculars. It doesn't sound like much, but hear me out. I am not sure what these exactly do yet, but the long and short of it is you zoom in, hold the trigger to target anyplace on the map, and some sort of laser oriented orbital air strike hits, decimating about two virtual blocks into chunks of fiery debris (which also looks good, as the vehicles blow apart very satisfyingly.) Very rare to find a set of these things, but very fun once you do. I had someone actually use them on me while I hovered in a Warhawk above a flag, protected the folks below trying to cap it (the laser moves VERY fast.) I blew up, and the laser continued it's path into my teammates below which included three foot soldiers, two jeeps, a tank, and myself. Nothing but burning cars and ragdoll corpses flying about like a gruesome ballet. Sure, we lost the flag, but it looked so freaking COOL.
Along the way, you can find and jump into mounted weapons, whether they be on a vehicle, a mounted MG on the ground, or anti-aircraft flak cannons (also useful to idiots getting to close on the ground) and giant anti-aircraft missile batteries that lock on and fire to gigantic homing missiles. You don't want to be on the receiving end of these things.
The Warhawks themselves start out with machine guns with no worries about ammo, only overheating, five or so "Swarm Missiles" that you can lock multiple onto one target and release a torrent of rocketed death, and one chaff to shake unwanted missile attention. You can fly through and pick up other weapons, and they are some REAL good fun.
TOW missile, which is fired while hovering, goes into a black and white camera mode where you guide it to something you want to kill up close and personal like, but don't want to go through all that trouble of being shot. The Lightning gun, which can be charged up and fired at a vehicle, causing a lot of damage over time to it and anyone near it, or at the ground, where it electrifies the area and hurts anything dumb enough to stick around. Very useful for getting peons off your flag. Also useful to tag a Warhawk with, because even if the pilot finds a place to land, and gets out, the still pulsing electricity is sure to fry them before they can get out of range.
Homing missiles, floating "air mines," and area clearing cluster bombs round out the rest of the weapon set. The cluster bombs have already become a contest of sorts, as you see people not content to just fly overhead slowly and drop them, or hover over top a flag and release fragmented death. Oh no, these hotshots have to come in at full afterburned speed (slight speed boost by holding R2, but double tapping R2 causes you to shoot blue flames and go supersonic for a short, rechargeable time) and dive bomb targets. And they have already gotten really good, hitting tanks, moving jeeps, even hovering Warhawks. Never underestimate a dedicated player.
You can pick up health, refills on weapons, and that sort of thing just by flying through them (also glowing about the map, only a lot bigger and on mountain tops.) Usually, however, there is someone trying to shoot your ass off, so be quick about it.
GAME MODES: Your standard affair of Deathmatch, Team deathmatch, Capture the flag... All things we've seen before, though well executed here. There is an option when you are setting up a server to allow flags to be carried in Warhawks, which sounds kind of cheap until you realize that you can't just bail out of a Warhawk at any time. You have to find a spot the Warhawk deems worthy of landing, which just means some place wide enough to touch the wheels down. This seems to be the only real use for the passenger in the Warhawk, as you can nab the enemy flag, jump off the bases roof all Bruce Willis like, and land on your friends wing. Jump in the cockpit and you are on your way.
The real star game mode is "Zone," however. This is probably going to be the most played mode in this game, because it's strangely addicting.
The general idea is this: You have a series of bases with flag poles in the middle, via the Battlefield series. You go and capture them. The catch is that standing in that area expands that bases "sphere of influence" up to three stages. The longer you stay there, the wider it gets, and each stage provides that base with nifty things like jeeps, tanks, weapons, and Warhawks. At first, you have to be on top of the flag to start expanding the influence, but as your zone gets bigger, so does your room to move. The more teammates in your sphere, the faster the little HUD meter will fill up, expanding it to the next level. However, the bigger your sphere, the more likely there is an enemy lurking somewhere in there, which halts the expansion meter completely in it's tracks (though it doesn't lower until he gets on top of the flag himself, repeating the process in reverse.)
This expansion also keeps nearby bases controlled by the enemy from growing any larger, as these zones cannot overlap. So if your zone gets big first, they will be stuck at "Zone level 2" and unable to grow any larger. This means no Warhawks will spawn in that zone until they can get into your offending base, shrink your zone, and give their little baby zone some room to grow big and strong.
You'd think this mode would get boring, with only the four or five maps provided in Beta, but since each Zone map has about five different kinds of sub-modes themselves, it really doesn't. These modes do anything from rearrange the base points, creating certain choke points that weren't there before, or other modes make it so you have to take over zones in a chain, much like Unreal Tournaments "Onslaught Mode." Making you unable to just cap any old base, you have to control each subsequent base in a row until you get to the enemies main base, eventually destroying it.
On top of all THAT, each map seems to have it's own personalized zone modes, like one that has an interior laden burned out, rubble filled castle that is the linchpin of the map. It effectively causes a "King of the Hill/Castle" game to break out. Interior battles + flame thrower = fun, folks. Another map called "Archipelago" is a series of islands on long spindles of land, effectively raising you to an altitude well about the cloud cover. Thus, it lends to a nice game of "Island Hopping" where you have to control an islands base to get the necessary vehicles to spawn to get to the NEXT island, to take that one over. Sure, you can spawn back at your already captured bases to get a ride, but it leaves the base of the front line undefended. It's a game of nothing but choke points, and it can take a while, but it's never boring.
