Well, the Demo is out now! Full game out on April the 1st 2021. Any Demo progress carries over to the full game. I tried it out earlier today (Steam) in the hopes I'd like it, but ehhh... It's not for me at all. Very crash happy for a start! The audio seems off and I'm really bored by the dialogue, have to keep looking away from the screen because they over-use shaky cameras and the writing/storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. I've never been a fan of a character just monotonously reeling off back-story though. It's a shame because I wanted to like it, but I spent my time playing day-dreaming about doing housework I've been putting off - that is never a good sign!! site | twitter | discord | youtube | instagram | facebook
It has the same fundamental problem I have with all of these games, Borderlands already exists and it's better. I'm sure someone can tell the difference, but this, Destiny, Anthem etc all boil down to being Borderlands but not funny.
So its Anthem minus the mobility and comes from Squealix, the esteemed publishers of fine shovelware such as Marvel's Avengers, Left Alive, The Quiet Man and Just Cause 4. That'll be a hard no from me.
Played a couple of hours as a Pyro and my first impressions are "meh". Ok gun and ability mechanics mixed with terrible level design and forgettable characters. The game (or at least what we have seen in the demo so far) consists of: - Receive mission from central hub area - run through linear corridor until you find the start of the mission - cut scene of opening door / gate (yes really!) - run through linear corridor until you enter the first "arena" - Fight waves of enemies that come from the other side and rush you and/or shoot from cover. - Once defeated enemy #25 will drop key to allow progress to next area - cut scene of opening door / gate (yes really!) - Repeat last three steps above until you reach the boss room and / or if you die due to the terrible cover mechanics. - Fight boss and collect loot - Use teleport to go back to central hub - Repeat all of the above until all missions / side quests completed in area then move on to next hub The biggest issue I have bar far is the level design. In this regard It feels like a game from at least a decade ago with generic boxy areas filled out with waist high walls and a complete lack of organic cover such as what you would find in say the Division series. You enter an empty area only to trigger the enemies by moving too far forward past an invisible trigger point. There is no way of approaching the fight from any other way beyond just smashing through the lot and hoping for the best. The gun play and abilities are cool enough but considering the way you progress through each level they get boring very quickly. The second issue I have is that the game looks, well, not all that great. It's certainly passable but its generic art style doesn't help when compounded on top of the above. In addition to these major flaws (imo) the game also suffers from frequent 30fps cut scenes (apparently these are being fixed in the full release to not be 30fps) for both quest dialogue (ok) and also doing anything like opening doors or transversing anything bigger than a waist high wall. Seriously any door you open you will enjoy a lovely fade to black, followed by a cut scene of your character opening the door and then finally another fade to black before you take control again. It gets old very quickly. There are a few other niggles like cut scene shakey cam, a rather bland story (although this may get better in the full game) and really terrible performance in certain areas (low GPU utilisation). This latter point seems like it can be fixed as forcing DX12 brings back half the frame rate albeit at the cost of stuttering. I am going to play some more with the other classes but my main criticisms will still be there. I can see some promise in the game, especially if the later levels become more expansive or at the very least allow for more angles of attack. I did hear on one review that there will be "end game" levels which will be more open and have more enemy diversity (or more enemies, they weren't clear in explaining that) which sounds cool. However, I would ask, if that will be the case they why can't the rest of the game also be like that?! Sorry for the ranty post, I am just really struggling to understand why everyone is raving over the gameplay when it literally does nothing new and in many way feels like we have gone back in time.
Decided to buy this today. I have watched probably 1 hours worth of coverage of this game when the Demo was out and tried the Demo myself. When I played the Demo it seemed like it was missing something, I couldn't quite put my finger on it but I wasn't sold on the game. After release I watched probably another hours worth of content between Twitch and YouTube and then decided to give it a shot. I am still trying to get in to the story aspect of it, as it seems unlike some other games that there is actually a story there but it takes some figgering out. The game has some pretty decent mechanics but they seem to get old really fast at the start, but the "World Tier" thing is causing a few issues for me, simply because by Default it's set to "Auto Increase World Tier" but you are not always levelled etc for that new tier so you get slapped around and can barely do anything until you realise you can drop it down a tier or 2 in order to level up etc. Shooting wise it's not bad, it feels very much like a mix between The Division 1 and Anthem which isn't to me a bad thing as they both to me anyway had decent gun mechanics etc. Graphically it's not bad but it doesn't look to me like a "New" game it looks quite "Old" even at 1440p maxed out. Sounds and Voices seem off to me though, it's like sometimes you will shoot and you get the normal sound and then other times it's as if you are hitting sheets of metal in front of you despite hitting a "Fleshy" enemy. The voices compared to the mouth movements don't seem right either, it's sometimes like watching one of those old badly dubbed Kung Fu movies "Speak, wait 2 seconds, mouth moves" type of things or it's in "Sync" for lack of a better word but the animations don't match up with what is being said Performance wise, well oh my day's is it poor! At 1440p maxed out, I am struggling to keep over 70FPS in most areas and even the "Cut Scenes" at times drop from over 100FPS to below 30FPS. The lowest I have seen it go whilst playing as in, not in a "Cut Scene" is around 35FPS at 1440p on a 2080TI. GPU most of the times is sitting at around 85% usage and CPU (3950x) is sitting at around 11%. I do have older drivers installed for my GPU so maybe some of the performance is down to that, but seriously this game needs work, it's only because I have a G'Sync monitor that I have actually played past the 2 hour mark because if I didn't have that I would have refunded it after 20 minutes. I tried the DX12 mode and it was shockingly poor, much worse than DX11 which is what I thought it would be since I have seen they re-enabled DX11 because of the issues with DX12. The annoying thing is though is that the Demo ran better and smoother by about 25% overall. I do agree with @xaser04 though, in that most of the game is: Go to "A" Speak to "B" Go to "Z" Cutscene of door opening, barrier dropping, climbing up a wall, climbing over a wall, sliding down a rope Run along pre-determined path shooting enemies that come from 2 or 3 locations and can easily be killed in a "Kill Box" by abilities Pick up item Go to "C" Cutscene again like above Fight more enemies in same style only a different looking location Pick up item Go to "D" Cutscene again Go to "E" Fight more enemies or boss Cutscene Go to "F" Fast Travel Go to "G" Speak to "B" Claim reward Now I know most games are like above, but this game is does not seem to make any sort of deviation along the way from what I have played so far and I am really hoping it's not like this all the way through otherwise it's going to get very boring, and will be uninstalled faster than it can drop the frame rate. One of the few reasons I bought this game is because it gave me something other to play than Destiny 2, PUBG, Elite Dangerous and the Alpha for Elite Dangerous Odyssey. Don't get me wrong, I am somewhat enjoying playing a different game and looking at the ways I can improve my experience etc, but I would not recommend anyone buying this game for at least a month or two, in order to see if the devs sort out the performance etc.
I am currently playing through this on Xbox Series S as part of a let's play series (new channel on YT under Xaser04Gaming if anyone is interested), and whilst my opinion of the level design and overall gameplay loop haven't really changed, I have switched out to the Devastator class and it is much more enjoyable as a solo experience. That said I am playing it as part of Game Pass and the performance on console feels far more consistent that it did on PC, yes even on the Series S. One thing I certainly concur with @damien c on is the World Tier set to auto increase. In my playthrough I am deliberately only following the main story and have found a couple of points more challenging than they feel they should be. The first major boss that isn't an altered took me two attempts as I died on the third stage. Funnily enough it was the first time where I was glad to see adds in a boss encounter. They were allowing me to re-gen my health and trigger increased armour (mod perk).
I need to do more testing, but it seems like nVidia DLSS is auto enabled on a nVidia card. I looked at it yesterday and noticed it was set to "Quality", and when I turned it off the game was unplayable but when I set it to "Performance" I was getting on average 50% better FPS. Won't be able to look at it properly till the weekend but if it is that it's auto enabled then it does some the devs have a lot of work to do to fix the performance of this game because even with it enabled the frame rates are jumping around.
