What a game!
Tanith and I played split-screen well into the night, and for the first time in a while the split is of the good, old fashioned variety with no silly aspect ratio tricks or any such nonsense. Also it splits straight down the middle, which on a Widescreen LCD gives each person pretty much a full screen, and you never feel at a loss for sharing.
Initially the scrolling menu does seem strange, but it works very well, and I would much rather scroll around my half of the screen that get a super-tiny version of the menu which I can't read. So for a change a design decision was made that actually works, and doesn't shaft the player in the process.
I haven't even seen the fullscreen game, but the splitscreen looks pretty damn tasty and the most ridiculous part of that is I haven't seen a single loadtime in the main areas, yet the landscape is absolutely massive. You can even go your separate ways, and you never get teleported closer to the other player, or start lagging.
Art style wise the cell-shading isn't overbearing, as is the case with a couple of other games. It seems rather than the usual flat textures, they've gone for a normal textured feel, but with the flat outlines, giving it a cartoony yet realistic look all at the same time.
And lag...what lag? We probably put in about six hours last night, and there was never a spot of framedrop or stutter, which is quite often the case for splitscreen.
As for the game itself, you all know that I don't really like grinding games much, but this one is quite different.
Sure there's plenty of grinding, and the same enemies come at you again and again and again. But unlike Ass Creed which I've been playing this week, the maps and missions are constructed in such a fashion that you only really visit the entry point twice, and then the rest of the map is different on every mission with only minor overlaps at times.
Quests it seems are also setup in such a way, that you'll never need to run around killing stuff pointlessly just to level up. You can literally just play the quests, and level up accordingly, either through the quest or travelling towards it. None of that running around in a random field for three hours, just to gain two levels, just to be killed by the boss anyway, and then doing it all over again.
It starts off very slowly though, and you can't distribute skill points before you hit Lv 5. Sort of a pseudo-n00b-island, where your guns are also absolutely pathetic, but once you hit Lv5 things start to really get fun.
We only played up to Lv11, where you also just about get vehicles which could add a whole other dimension to the game, but I'll need to report back on that later.
Overall I'm very glad Strife put this one on my radar, and for the price I paid it was a real bargain, but in retrospect I would actually pay R600 for this.
And on this one we won't even argue about SP vs COP, I think it will be absolutely rubbish to play alone, but should be awesome with four people. Now I'm just wondering if you can go online in splitscreen mode, because then I might just buy madam a sub for Live.
