So, other than myself and wormholewizards and myself, has anyone else played the demo yet?
I just played it for the last 2 hours (still playing, just minimized to take a break) and it feels really good. Mechanics are solid - as with Enemy Unknown, you can blow up walls and objects, and they will have cracks and other signs to reflect their extent of damage. Playing on Veteran is what you'd expect from a game like this - starts off easy at first, then the difficulty starts to ramp up as you encounter more aliens. The random element of the game is well-balanced. Shame there aren't Saving Private Ryan moments, but there are still lulzy situations.
One of them was this: my 10-yo brother was playing just now. He's an X-COM newbie, but he got the hang of the game fast enough. He watched me play the first mission and saw that I only had to deal with one alien grunt (but that grunt had killed 3 civilians), so in his first mission he got cocky and dove straight into the crashed UFO with just one soldier. He found himself surrounded by 3 aliens (forgot their names) instantly, and we were laughing p. hard about it. He also learnt the basics of air combat fast, and then he got cocky again and sent a dropship (Chinook) unguarded. The dropship got blown up by a fighter.
Speaking of aerial combat, it's more tactical than X-COM's. The graphics are minimalistic, but the game is very fluid. No doubt it's RTWP, but it's very manageable. I'm not sure if you'll ever get to control more than 3 fighters.
All in all, it's really shaping up to be a very good game. I do think some aspects can be worked on, but it's really polished for an alpha. The sounds are very solid, and animations are smooth (though sometimes the game skips the animation for jumping over a barrier, which looks out of place). I'll play it some more later, then post a more solid AAR.
Post edited May 10, 2012 by lowyhong
