I know a lot of 3ds members expressed an interest in this title so on the way home from work last night I went into my local music/video/games store and picked up a copy. I had watched movies, read preview articles, browsed pictures and looked forward to this, the latest Star Wars computer games.
The system that I installed it on was my home gaming pc, which is:
As with the other recent fps games that have been released based on the Quake3 engine I set my graphics levels fairly high as I expected my Geforce3 to hand the graphics without problems.
1024x768 resolution, very high texture details, trilinear filtering(but also Anisotropic filtering in the "More Video" options) and V-Sync disabled. In my OpenGL driver settings I set 2x AntiAliasing.
When I initially started the game looking at some larger objects (ship and sky right in front of you when you first enter the game) I experienced some slow down. Previously I had experienced this with resolutions greater than 1024. After a couple of minutes of gameplay it hung, after a reboot and another couple of minutes it hung again. Third time lucky and after taking of AA and dropping the anisotropic filtering to x2 it ran ok. Funny thing was that I was able to set it back to almost the same as the original settings that had seemingly resulted in the computer lockups/hangs and it still ran fine
Anyway onto the game play. For difficulty level I choose jedi (one up from padawan which I assumed meant easy). Ok my first complaint is the crosshair seems to hug walls. I'm not sure if this is something related to the difficulty setting as it seemed to have a bearing on aim at enemies, sort of snaps to the target when you move the crosshair close enough. My second complaint is again possibly related to level of difficulty. I found that I could go round a corner and take shot at a stormtrooper back off and hide round the corner, then go back round and he would still be in the same position. The only noticable AI that I have spotted so far (onto 2nd level) is that if you shoot officers first the stormtroopers sometimes run away. Thankfully the puzzles in the game are the usual straight forward "Get object, put object" school of thinking and so far have involved activating gun turrets to shoot through blast doors, controlling the little box droids that you see running around the death star in Star Wars to shut off some valves so that you can enter an otherwise fatal room.
The graphics in this game are top notch. And running around with a lightsaber is every boys dream
The weapons are very, how should I put it, Quakish with the multiplayer game featuring a sniper rifle that has just a little similarity to the Quake series' Railgun.
The multiplayer seems to have some problems even though the majority of the code must be quake3 based. Very laggy but just like a lot of the MOH:AA multiplayer test games they were run on home users computers and therefore likely to have bandwidth issues with more than about 4 people connecting. Lightsaber battles will take a bit of practice and getting used to as blocking seems to be a passive action i.e. just not moving. Most battles that I took part in reminded me of the button bashing that most people new to Tekken series of games resorted to.
To sum up, its another Quake3 engine games (Good), and its based in the Star Wars universe (Good) but on the otherhand the multiplayer part seems a bit limited (Bad) and at this point with my limited amount of play in the single player the AI seems to be quite limited in comparison to RTCW and MOH:AA but this could just be a level of difficulty issue.
Well those are my initial impressions, please add your own opinions and experiences with this games. I will post back when I have played a bit more of it
Arris
The system that I installed it on was my home gaming pc, which is:
- 1.4Ghz Athlon running at 1.53Ghz
- 256 DDR Ram
- 20GB Maxtor 5400rpm Hard disk
- Asus v8200 Geforce3
- 19" Samsung 957DF Monitor
- Hercules Fortissimo 2 Sound card
- Windows 98SE
As with the other recent fps games that have been released based on the Quake3 engine I set my graphics levels fairly high as I expected my Geforce3 to hand the graphics without problems.
1024x768 resolution, very high texture details, trilinear filtering(but also Anisotropic filtering in the "More Video" options) and V-Sync disabled. In my OpenGL driver settings I set 2x AntiAliasing.
When I initially started the game looking at some larger objects (ship and sky right in front of you when you first enter the game) I experienced some slow down. Previously I had experienced this with resolutions greater than 1024. After a couple of minutes of gameplay it hung, after a reboot and another couple of minutes it hung again. Third time lucky and after taking of AA and dropping the anisotropic filtering to x2 it ran ok. Funny thing was that I was able to set it back to almost the same as the original settings that had seemingly resulted in the computer lockups/hangs and it still ran fine
Anyway onto the game play. For difficulty level I choose jedi (one up from padawan which I assumed meant easy). Ok my first complaint is the crosshair seems to hug walls. I'm not sure if this is something related to the difficulty setting as it seemed to have a bearing on aim at enemies, sort of snaps to the target when you move the crosshair close enough. My second complaint is again possibly related to level of difficulty. I found that I could go round a corner and take shot at a stormtrooper back off and hide round the corner, then go back round and he would still be in the same position. The only noticable AI that I have spotted so far (onto 2nd level) is that if you shoot officers first the stormtroopers sometimes run away. Thankfully the puzzles in the game are the usual straight forward "Get object, put object" school of thinking and so far have involved activating gun turrets to shoot through blast doors, controlling the little box droids that you see running around the death star in Star Wars to shut off some valves so that you can enter an otherwise fatal room.
The graphics in this game are top notch. And running around with a lightsaber is every boys dream
The weapons are very, how should I put it, Quakish with the multiplayer game featuring a sniper rifle that has just a little similarity to the Quake series' Railgun.
The multiplayer seems to have some problems even though the majority of the code must be quake3 based. Very laggy but just like a lot of the MOH:AA multiplayer test games they were run on home users computers and therefore likely to have bandwidth issues with more than about 4 people connecting. Lightsaber battles will take a bit of practice and getting used to as blocking seems to be a passive action i.e. just not moving. Most battles that I took part in reminded me of the button bashing that most people new to Tekken series of games resorted to.
To sum up, its another Quake3 engine games (Good), and its based in the Star Wars universe (Good) but on the otherhand the multiplayer part seems a bit limited (Bad) and at this point with my limited amount of play in the single player the AI seems to be quite limited in comparison to RTCW and MOH:AA but this could just be a level of difficulty issue.
Well those are my initial impressions, please add your own opinions and experiences with this games. I will post back when I have played a bit more of it
Arris
