This bun needs to be put back in the oven, it ain't done yet. Graphics are fairly poor, old style, but I knew that going in and it does not bother me, gameplay and smooth framerates are far more important to me than eye candy.
The cons:
Too many to list, but I can throw a few out.
1. Game crashes for me when I try to start it, I crash to desktop a lot during the loading process but can eventually get through with a bit of perseverance.
2. Game server crashed a WHOLE bunch last night (big surprise).
3. When the game server was up they reduced the maximum amount of players to 500 so only a lucky few could get on (so much for the statement on their web page "There is no hard limit to the amount of players we can support").
4. When I finally got into the game the graphics are very out of date, kind of looks like something I ran on my old 486. This does not bother me much as gameplay is more important but I was hoping for a bit crisper look. The game looks like it is running way under sampled (lots of "jaggies").
5. My biggest problem is that when I go to fly a plane on-line I will crash to desktop very soon after taking off. Others were able to fly because when I was actually playing and got involved with the invasion of a German held town there was some cool fighting in the sky above.
6. When infantry reload there is no animation for it, detracts from immersion.
7. And other problems like the bug where all sound goes away when you play infantry. Or the bug where you can not spawn as anything unless you choose a mission to take (people were just throwing up simple missions like "take that town" so people could spawn as something).
8. There is a frame rate counter in game and it reports low frame rates. Was saying like 26fps for me when in the open doing nothing. This has to be very inaccurate though because when it was reading my 14fps when in the target area where several people were fighting it looked perfectly smooth. Whatever.
9. I have not been able to figure out if Infantry can use anything but the riffle or machine gun they spawn with. I have not been able to change loadouts on any vehicle. I am hoping this will be fixed soon.
10. I was unable to change the mouse sensitivity.
11. Game names must be at least 4 characters (letters or numbers) and no more than 8 characters. And as far as I can tell no capitol letters are allowed. So much for trying to put Widowmaker in there. My in game name is "reynark", Palooka will recognize the name (hint, has something to do with an EQ character).
There were other bugs but these are the ones that come to mind at the moment.
Pro's:
1. Battlefield is HUGE. It does take time to get from most spawn areas to a fighting area. If you try to run from town to town (and the one I was at looked pretty close to the other on the map) can take a loooong time. I ran for about 10 min and was not quite half way to the enemy town.
2. Cool feature of being able to ride on vehicles, c'mon, d'ya think guys marched all the way to the front? You can hitch a ride on some tanks just by pressing the J button on the keyboard (same to get off). Also the trucks players drive will hold several infantry and be able to tow the big AT and AA guns. Riding in a truck was very cool for me, you can turn your head right and left to look around a bit and I tell you when 2 BF109's are coming around for a strafing run on the column you are a part of (tanks and transport trucks) it is a very scary feeling (until 2 friendly spits show up out of nowhere and distract them... whew).
3. Game physics are well done. At least most of them. Planes are well modeled and will throw you around if you don't keep control of them. Ground vehicles are very well modeled and "feel" right. Infantry feels lacking in realism to me because I am so used to Tribes, Counterstrike, DoD, etc... that the infantry in WWII feel slow and sluggish (as it should be) but as I played the game (on those rare times I could) I got used to it. I still have yet to use my riffle in combat.
4. Feels great to be a soldier in the field riding a truck with a bunch of tanks around you, other grunts by your side and the planes escorting from above. The one organized effort I was in "felt" right, I was able to look around and see all these vehicles moving across the field and it was good.
5. So far the chat systems seems to work very well. The chat windows are all "radio" channels ala the old Air Warrior. But most radio channels can only be heard from a certain distance away so you should only hear chatter from your specific fighting area (that is what someone said last night). The radio ranges are unknown to me but seemed to be adequate for what we were doing.
6. Rank system is interesting and I am looking forward to seeing what kinds of player made missions will be posted when the game is working as intended.
7. Terrain modeling is very good. The graphics may be a notch toward the past but the terrain model is very good. There were many rolling hills with a few high ones. You could see quite a ways into the distance so you could see the road snake off into the horizon, up hills, etc... Brush is more evident than in Everquest with sometimes sparse trees in fields and tall grass for infantry to hide in. There are groups of trees around for tanks to park behind and a couple times I saw some actual forests that were thick and dark, no idea if infantry can crawl through them or not as I was trying to get the hang of driving a tank in an unoccupied zone.
8. They did away with having to "qualify" offline to drive or fly. This was a feature they were talking about pre release but apparently they did not implement. There is an offline practice mode to get the hang of controls (and customize them because some of the defaults make no sense). Do not judge the game on the single player practice. It is very much just to let you play with the controls and does not do justice to on-line game play.
9. When I hit a German infantry with my tank gun (I actually hit something!) he disappeared in a fine red mist.
10. Each vehicle is 100% different from every other vehicle. You have to get a feel for each one, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.
11. NO STRAFE SHOOTING OR STUPID DEATHMATCH JUMPING TO AVOID SHOTS! You best have aim and skill to live in this game.
12. There is a cursor that was really annoying me because the game cursor stays on the screen and was moving around as I moved the mouse to look as an infantry. This would have gone in Con's if you could not get rid of it with LCNTRL+LSHIFT+C. Again to get rid of the mouse cursor use LeftControl+LeftShift+C. This is a toggle so do it again if you want cursor back again.
13. Chat window is easily resizable and movable to any where on the screen.
To keep perspective Everquest SUCKED when it first came out too (you should see some of the early screenshots).
I like the game but it so not done. I spent hours last night trying to get it to run while watching TV. It is so not finished that I was actually laughing out loud. It was funny.
I give this game 3 out of 5 stars and would rate it 4 out of 5 if they fixed the server and client crashes and 5 out of 5 if they fixed the crashes and cleaned up the graphics.
I will be giving this game a chance. Hopefully I will have some time to play around with it this weekend but my folks are coming over for yet another visit (ever hear about wearing out your welcome, mom and dad?) and even if I have time no guarantee that the servers will be working.
peace,
[AK]Widowmaker