Well, first answer: Download it yourself and see. The demo is now available for everyone, at ~2.1 GB.
For a more detailed answer, I'll go over what Wayward was talking about:
I just played the demo and thought I'd add my 2 cents. The game looks great and feels good and heavy. Production values it has in spades.
More or less true. I saw one comically-bad instance of lip syncing on Tidus, but the rest of the game looked shiny. Er, well, dirty, but a shiny kind of dirt. The kind with gratuitous blood everywhere.
Unfortunately, that's where I end my praise. The camera works well enough when you're shooting stuff, but it's pretty bad when you inevitably find yourself in melee. Speaking of melee; I did rather enjoy it for a few minutes, but quickly got tired of performing the one and only combo again, and again, and again. There are a few different execution animations to break things up, but you see them often enough that a few is far too few.
I didn't have any major issues with the melee camera, really. It takes some getting used to the turn speed, but otherwise I felt it served admirably at showing your immediate surroundings.
The combos, though, felt visually-repetitive. There is one melee button (right-click), and pressing it repeatedly triggers a single combo of 4 slashes. Which is always the same combo. It gets a little bit more interesting when you realize that F (the stun button) can be used at any point in a combo to trigger a different stun-based move (kicking the foe, shoulder-bashing them, etc), but even then, there's a painfully-limited number of possible moves with each weapon.
The game touts 4 different weapons, and while only 2 seem to be in the demo (chainsword and a brief moment with the power axe), the in-game combo list confirms that they all follow the same basic pattern: one main combo, with a few ways of finishing it with a stun.
Execution moves make life a touch more exciting... but, I dunno, maybe Arkham Asylum spoiled me, but there seemed to be only a handful of different executions. Plus, the 'cinematic camera' often clips through the wall... or
you clip through the wall... obscuring the carnage.
The game employs a Halo-style recharging shield system (despite space marines not wearing energy shields of any sort that I'm aware) with a persistent health bar underneath. There aren't health packs or the slow regeneration you might expect from a space marine's implants. Instead, you regain health by performing melee executions. Maybe it isn't a health bar, but a morale bar; getting shot just makes a marine sad, and they can only feel better about it by singling out and gutting one opponent. Hacking down hordes at a time just isn't satisfying, I guess.
I think the health system deserves a little more love, TBH. You've got some kind of top health layer that regenerates when out of combat, and a second health bar that regenerates when you messily dismember opponents with so-called 'Execution' moves. Flipping through the dev diaries, we discover that regenerating health in combat is one of the game's main features - Space Marines don't cowardly retreat when injured, and so turning enemies into your health source is an exciting-if-canonically-retarded idea.
I thought things might get more interesting when I moved on to the assault pack portion of the demo, but, if anything, they got less interesting. Why bother shooting or gutting things when you can repeatedly jump, then land with more force and blast radius than the wimpy grenades you have, with no recharge time whatsoever?
I also had to complain about the assault pack, but for different reasons. First, the devs were totally lazy with the "equip the jumppack" cutscene - seriously, guys? That's the best you could do? Okay, enough pettiness.
My main complaint, rather, was that it's bloody tough to track. Jumping into the air isn't a particularly smooth transition, and between Tidus and the massive flare from his jets, it's nigh-impossible to actually spot your targets, let alone the reticule that lets you target your landing. The actual impact was satisfying, but didn't feel overpowered - enemies are still perfectly capable of shooting you out of the air, and between the time necessary to jump up, then land, then finish off the stunned opponents, it probably would've been faster to just slash them.
Okay, I think I'm done ranting. I just think this could have been an amazing game if they spent as much time and effort on gameplay as they did making it look pretty (in a grimdark sort of way). As it is, I, for one, will be saving my $50 for something that can hold my attention longer than 5 minutes.
I don't know if this is worth $50, but it's definitely worth
some money. I'd wait for a sale - I don't expect multiplayer to take off, so it should be on sale shortly. (Multiplayer: "Oh, goodie, another single-player game with multi-player tacked on. Oh, what's that? There's only one melee button and no block? Welp, guess this isn't a melee-focused game. Oh, so all that's left is a third-person shooter with a handful of generic weapons? Oh goodie indeed.")
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Topic: Warhammer 40000: Space Marine (Read 26762 times)