Meh, started playing it last night and I think I'm about to start the final mission now.
This game is definitely a recipe for the common love/hate affair. It has some good concepts and fun gameplay, but some glaring flaws. Lets start with the good so this doesn't appear all rant.
Pros
1. Graphics (lighting balance) are better than I'd anticipated. Gameplay trailers don't do it justice.
2. There's some great new weapons, esp the grenades.
3. Exo suit adds fun elements for navigation, and melee.
4. Grapple is cool, and love doing stealth kills with it.
5. Levels are pretty well designed and the hover vehicles fun.
6. Great voice acting and fairly good story overall.
7. Your squad AI don't clean up for you if you slack. You have to be on your toes.
Cons
1. Out of sync load scenes, FPS drops, and hitching here and there (Manhunt mission). Seems to get worse over time.
2. Checkpoints can get corrupted causing crashing, AI miscues, and audio dropouts.
3. Changing settings to bench is a PITA! Every time it restarts the game and makes you wait through a lengthy load scene.
4. To exit game you have to start the next mission and wait through it's lengthy load scene, unless you're in the middle of one.
5. Exo abilities are preselected for you on each mission.
6. Gameplay is full of very scripted, cinematic, linear moments, some of which are utterly ridiculous ("boat" scene).
7. NV sucks, I usually use a target enhancer weapon in darkness instead.
8. The lighting is a bit unbalanced (too dark at times, too bright and hazy at times).
9. Upgrades are in some ways too arcade biased in their point issuing system. I want to focus on flank risk and objectives, not where and how I kill each enemy. That said, I don't mind at all having intel be one of the criteria, at least that gives it a purpose, but the squad and coms AI tend to rush you through, making you feel frustrated when looking for it.
I can't agree more with W1zzard that there is def something up with optimization regarding RAM. I don't think my GPU is the problem. It says I'm using 2596MB of it, and I've even tried the "Optimal" settings and Windowed Borderless and various combinations and cvar tweaks, none of which helped.
Mostly in game it plays well. I got a bit of hitching in places in Manhunt, but after restarting the game and choosing that mission via mission select, it played a lot smoother. That level def has some frame dips and hitching though. With "Optimal" settings I can get 75-130 FPS in a lot of levels, but there it commonly dips under 50 FPS. I only mentioned the FPS for a comparison. It's the hitching in that level more than the FPS that bothers me.
It's common that when I first start the game the load scene for the level I'm on will play flawlessly, and these scenes are well done and very lifelike. After just one mission though, the next mission's load scene will usually play very out of sync, and it really takes you out of the immersion. Given what it takes just to exit game and restart a mission to see the scene in sync, I usually just trudge on.
Now I'm sure Manhunt's issues come down to level complexity, AI activity, and maybe some overlooked optimizations, but the out of sync load scenes seems to be a general memory leak thing throughout the game. It's entirely possible that Manhunt is partly affected by it too though, because as I said, starting that level fresh made it run a LOT smoother.
I think some of it though is no doubt that PC games are getting increasingly larger texture files and PCs have yet to utilize unified memory, which can cause hitching and frame drops when big texture files are loaded in and out of memory, which I'm sure is happening when shaders are preloading during load scenes. I can't wait until 2016. This game played on a high end Pascal GPU might not have such problems.
I just finished the game and am now wondering if Unity will have even worse technical problems with all those detailed textures to load.
