Quick Review-

If the actual game is anything like the demo, it’ll be an immersive wonderful game with depth and detail in every aspect, good fighting with a new kind of stealth and loads of fun to play.  Grade of A overall !  Get the demo for yourself and see.

 

Long Review-

So I downloaded the demo a few days ago and just had a change to play it Thursday.  The first thing I noticed is that for a 2 gigabyte demo, it’s pretty short.  But when you play the demo, you see how many art assets and sound (all in very high quality) that it actually loads . . . but still it just seams short.  I know with a demo you’re suppose to leave people wanting more, and the demo does a good job of showing you the basic game mechanics . . . but the entire thing consists of: a room, a hallway, a large room, an even larger room and that’s it.  I dunno, I just wanted a better feel of the game as a whole. 

 

Graphics get an A, Level design A.  Everything was very nice and sleek but nothing ground breaking as far as geometry goes.  However there are high resolution textures on everything, which give even the smallest objects nice detail. Character models are rounded and also have a lot of depth in the detail on them and their clothing and such, though it’s obvious the inmates have been juicing ‘cause the smallest inmate is still massive compared to the guards (someone’s been playing Gears of War on the design team).  When you knock a guy down, you can see the bottom of his feet are dirty . . . and just in the places you’d expect (no grey in the arches, just the heal and ball of the foot), this is the level of detail that impresses me the most.  While the basic usable area of the levels are a bit ‘blocky’ (basically square halls leading to square rooms, as is normal) they did an excellent job of giving a sense of depth to things.  The ceilings of the hallways have rafters and air ducts and pipes, and I’m glad to see them even in places you cant use them (I’m tired of seeing an air duct only when the designers want me to crawl in one, or a rafter only when I’m suppose to use it to get to the next room).  They have gone out of their way to fill the offices and corridors with logical necessities and it event tells a story (you can tell what an office was used for by what’s in it, they aren’t all just cookie cutter).  One hall early in the demo was lined with inmates cells, and while you couldn’t get in them, you could see through glass into them . . . they weren’t just empty boxes, they had stuff in them.  Very good attention to detail here.   One thing I did notice, and I only mention it because it’s the only negative I could come up with, is that the few times some of the plants appear in the demo are one dimensional and always face the player, while other places you see a fully 3D model.  Might be interesting to see how they do some of the other levels with Poison Ivy and such !

 

Sound gets an A- too, because it was all good but there was nothing ground breaking about it . . . though the fact that nothing caught my attention and stuck out means that it immersed me in the game, which is a good thing.  The rear speakers seam to be a bit louder then many other games but it works wonderfully to keep you keenly aware of your surroundings and I like it a lot.  It sounds like Mark Hamill is voicing the Joker, as he has done in several Batman animated series, and does a great job of it. 

 

The ‘Detective Mode’ that you can switch to is kind of a blend of x-ray vision (as you can see enemies and their skeletons through walls) and computer enhanced vision (as it highlights things you can grapple to).  I hope that in later levels there are other things to perch on then just the gargoyles . . . cause it got a bit repetitive even in the demo.  I like the Detective Mode a lot, though we didn’t get to do some of the more CSI’ish things that the videos seam to portray.  It also shows security devices on the walls (force fields to keep people in or out), but I cant seam to do anything with them in the demo.  Deceive Mode also highlights locked doors, force fields and the like.

 

The fighting system was simple, punches, counters, and combos.  Everything is context sensitive, so trying for a particular move is difficult . . . you basically just aim in the direction of a bad guy and decide to either hit, block, or finish them off.  You earn hit combos every three consecutive strikes (or so it looks like) and you do some cool slo-mo move for the next hit.  Combat always takes me a bit to get use to, but I picked this up pretty fast. 

 

The stealth system basically has you crouching behind stuff or moving above enemies and coming in from behind while out in the open, but the designers also give you many other areas for you to hide.  You can do silent takedowns if you sneak up behind the baddies and, if you’re on a perch and close enough, you can swoop down and kick them in the face !  The premise seams to be to take on people one at a time, or in small groups.  You lure a guy off from the pack, take him down, and before the others come running back to see what that noise was . . . you’ve hidden somewhere else to sneak up on the next guy.  All the while you hear the bad guys talking to each other, or themselves, and the better stealth job you do . . . the more afraid they get.  They even patrol differently when afraid. 

 

Which brings me to the AI.  With only a few baddies to interact with, it was difficult to get a true feeling, but these guys didn’t seam to have too many ‘scripted’ moments but rather make decisions in real time based on the environment and what you do.  I took out a guy by breaking through some plate glass, the sound attracted the three other guys in the room who came running toward the sound.  I took cover and watched as they examined the body and then spread out again to cover the room and look for me.  They seamed to stick to an area of the room, but never a set ‘patrol path’ or anything. 

 

The design in general is dark, but not like splinter cell dark (where everything was either shadow or bright light).  It’s an industrial style asylum (think metal and stone block) that’s been modernized (think air ducts and computers and force fields).   It looks astonishing and, while I wasn’t even interested in this game when I first heard about it, I have to say it has me counting down the days until it’s release (10 days from this writing).  The only thing left to decide is if I want to preorder from Amazon and get $5 off, or just wait until day of and get it from my gamestop.

  

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