My system exceeds the minimum requirements for this demo (I won't be buying Micro$oft Window$ Vi$ta, thank you), but the recommended requirements tab of the SRLabs test
they themselves blinky-link to goes
far beyond where any but the truly hardcore gamer would go-
systemwise. This demo isn't optimized at all, and doesn't even look or play finished, which leads me to believe it's not done even as a demo and should never have been let off its leash. To wit:
System RAM
Recommended: 3 GB
You Have: 1.5 GB
FAIL: Snip.
Operating System
Recommended: Window$ Vi$ta
You Have: Micro$oft Window$ XP Profe$$ional x64 Edition Service Pack 2 (Build 3790)
FAIL: Snip. As if.
Video Card
Recommended: 768MB 3D 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible video card with shader model 4.0 (NVIDIA GeForce 8800+ / ATI Radeon 2900+)
You Have: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT (GeForce 8500 GT) (my edit: mine is a 512MB DX10 SM 4.0 compliant card, per the box)
My actual card---
I'll take a deep breath. SR Test has been known to be dead wrong on certain system configurations. The demo, however, still looks and plays by comparison to other demos (such as UT3 or Timeshift or Bioshock) like, well, shit.
The Hellgate: London demo is reminiscent of much older games, such as Quake 2, and in fact displays behavior I have either never seen before or haven't seen in years. These statements are not compliments. They are instead indictments, subpoenas, searches, and
literally twitchy, birdlike double-take seizures of the "whaaaaat?" kind. Hellgate: London is either simply not even close to done, unpolished, or a representative, a living embodiment, of the word '
craptastic'. Take your pick, but this beta 'demo' is
vastly unfinished. I'll explain.
I know this is a beta demo, but it needs to be sent back to alpha, which would itself actually be promoting underachievement. My very first thought when I actually started playing the demo and saw the textures in the environment was "did I mistakenly start some crappy Oblivion mod completely lacking SM 3.0 effects and HDR lighting?", but then I looked at my desire for and the game's
utter lack "implementation" of some sort of decent normal mapping, noticeable bump mapping, and displacement maps, and I thought, "but I don't have SWAT 3 installed." Then I saw their modeling team's version of a
chopped-up piece of styrofoam modeled rock, and thought, "but... I don't have Quake 2 installed..." and gave up, afraid Mario might pop out.
Later, I looked a bit closer, and I realized it wasn't just that, it was also the "artwork" itself- flat, undetailed, and frankly, as boring as a postal service training video. This game makes looking at the difference between my dirty microwave and my clean microwave fucking exciting (and as a disclaimer, it really
was dirty and I really
did clean it). The use of concrete building blocks that are just part of the texture, rather than an actual model, smacks of rank laziness, and while we all have our lazy fits now and again, modeling a convincing concrete block and then texturing it is not exactly rocket science. But then, it's obvious we're dealing with developers who apparently, like myself, grew up in Michigan and are thus
far removed even from bottle rockets.
On the
down side of the beta demo, there are elements of this game that are fascinating in their absence, such as any form of a physics engine (why do I run right over the boxes without them moving, again?), and no apparent understanding of what clipping really means (and never mind being able to walk right through scaffolding as if it weren't there). Cardboard boxes that don't budge and models that penetrate halfway into walls while doing God only knows what remind me of my first date, and that's generally a bad thing.
And that only deals with the graphics, such as they are. Sad to say, I only got ten minutes into the demo before the A. "I". forced my hand by its stupidity (hello, walking corpse? Me food. Me in front of you. Me target.), making me go unload my dishwasher rather than interact (or not) with them, for the simple fact that doing so- even though it is nearly 2:30AM at this writing- would be a far more entertaining, exciting, and productive endeavor than actually slogging my way through this over-hyped, under-delivering, well-watered load of stinking manure.
And I
didn't barf when I got done. It's a good thing keyboards are cheap...
(Sorry to tear it apart so viciously, but I quite honestly can't say a single good thing about this demo. The powers of Limited Bandwidth and Limited Time compel me to destroy it, before others cursed with slower speeds decide to invest their time, bandwidth, and hard drive space to this sorry pile of garbage...)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
