Played in anger (literally - nickachu and I had just encountered some complete cunts in MW2 and I needed a break lest I snap my controller in half with my bare hands) last night.
The controls really are appalling. Truly shit. Driving in an APC I found myself stuck in enemy fire while I struggled to remember what button let me back up. Left bumper (!?!) it turned out to be. The menu revealed this was all my stupid fault, obviously, the default was RIGHT bumper. You know, so that right trigger would be go forwards, as opposed to 'fire gun' as when you're on foot. Nice and sensible. Yes.
The sluggish feeling was slightly mitigated by turning sensitivity up to one notch below maximum. But for everyone else, seriously, do you really want to play in slow motion?
The environment feels lifeless, as there's hardly any radio chatter (as opposed to, say, Desert Combat, a mod, six years ago, which had well-written radio chatter to make the battlefield alive and hectic) and you're left with a few burbles (possibly in Russian) and the distant, automatically triggered shouts. These shouts, incidentally, are incredibly irritating, peppered as they are with entirely gratuitous swearing purely for swearing's sake.
I noted with some amusement there's a mini radio-controlled helicopter drone, just like in Frontlines. I have no idea what purpose it serves (the demo doesn't explain) but it caused another player in a proper Apache to crash into a crane trying to shoot at me. The Apache, incidentally, seems to control quite well but a combination of the fact you can only play online (no single player mode) combined with the usual problems of a game like this (five cunts all crouched on the helipad ready to rush for the helicopter when it spawns) prevented me from trying it more than once.
The destructible scenery is very cool. I was hiding behind a house as an engineer, repairing a friendly tank which was keeping enemy forces at bay. The enemy, firing at the tank, missed and instead blasted a huge hole in the wall of the house. I now had to stay crouched to avoid being sniped while I kept the tank alive.
There's no prone. A game where you can be a sniper, or indeed a machinegunner. But you can't go prone. Fucking hell. Myp-related-larfs aside, this is a serious issue. There's lots of low walls and stuff you could creep past if only you could lie on the fucking ground and crawl.
Driving vehicles is all kinds of fun (controls aside) and my favourite bit. Blasting enemy troops and vehicles alike, crashing through stuff, excellent. Less excellent is (again a symptom of this sort of game) people leaping into a vehicle with multiple seats and tearing off without waiting for anyone.
Overall, I'm intrigued, but I'm kind of curious why they're bothering with this when Battlefield 3 is on the way.
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