Soldato
Draw distance is appalling. Yes theres isn't too much pop up of stuff close, but everything being "out of focus" is a cheap trick to use low res low power stuff. The distance at which buildings are completely out of focus is normally laughable. THe problem with "focus" in games being billed as realistic is, in real life you can focus on any part of the world at any time and the rest isn't in focus, but what you're looking at is. A game can't just make random bits it doesn't want to draw out of focus, because in reality if i look at that building at the end of a very short street, i can see it in focus FFS. Games have to be in focus everywhere all the time because they can't decide which bit of the screen/scene you might be looking at.
AS i said, out of focus being a realism thing, is crap, its hiding lack of power. Very unimpressed with , well most character models, they seem very poor. Animation seems "ok" with most things, flying a chopper and watching someone(if you've nicked it and they want you out) hanging on for dear life till dropping out over the river from miles up is great although thanks to focus you can't damn well see a splash.
THis for PC with far bigger draw distance, high level AF is soooo massively needed, and 2xaa is screaming to be used, will be pretty damned good.
The shadows are also truly awful, they make everything look incredibly hazy when they don't need to. Not sure if its playing on a 1920x1200 screen, but the "softer" lighter edge of shadows looks damn crap, and as its fuzzy, looks fairly bad normally but when framerate is crap, with motion blur(another gpu power hiding "realism" effect) it looks horrifically bad.
Overall, though the city has a very nice feel to it, everything is just not as good as it really should be.
Gameplay, its quite nice, some buggy target locking. Frankly there shouldn't be target looking on foot but only when in a damn car, as some of the missions, shooting ruddy bikers
But the story is so cliche'd, everything that ever happens in all games is in there. NOt a suprise yet, most of the jokes have been done before, nothing inspiring, nothing EPIC about the story or even remotely enticing.
Gameplay feels good, but its lacking graphically, and story is weak.
I agree with pretty much all of that apart from the story being weak, I'm really enjoying it, the game mechanics feel good, but like you say the gfx are very very poor indeed, what makes it worse is the complete lack of anti-aliasing, also being rendered at 630p I think the jaggies show up allot more because the TV has to scale it more compared to 720p, frame-rate is also very poor, seems to dip right down to 15/20fps when you have a lot of AI on screen, even I who have been telling others not to expect the gfx to be amazing was quite shocked, normally with poor gfx there is a trade off, like 2/4x anti-aliasing, or super smooth frame rate, higher resolution etc, when you have a game that is poor gfx, poor frame rate, it makes you wonder a little, still, I'm gonna carry on because like I said I'm finding the story quite intriguing
You can't access it straight away anyway.
