Impressions as shit yo:
So, AusGAF have kind of picked up on this game pretty hard. A couple of fourpacks were purchased and then some. Being the only person in AusGAF who can be fucked hosting servers, I've also seen a fair bit of how the coop handles. So here's a bunch of things listed in no real order and with a very bad level of readability:
Things what are real good about this game:
The art. Man, the art and enviroments in this game are real good. Maybe not to like, a technical level, but they evoke some pretty big SciFi vibes from a range of different sources. The levels all have a real big sense of scale, and there are lots of interesting landmarks and features of each area.
The gunplay. Probably the best you can find in all of Source. It's real good. It's satisfying and fast, but kinda punishing when it needs to be. There are lots of weapons, and each one feels pretty different.
I also kinda really dig the inventory, and how it acts as a fairly good approximation of how you'd actually cart around guns on your body. Unfortunately I don't think it actually shows on your dude, but it's still a nice little idea and it balances out well. You can carry lots of little weapons, but once you start trying to carry around snipers or assault rifles, you have to start narrowing down your gear.
The kind of dynamic mission structure is kinda cool, though probably not as awesome as it could be. I've played the first city level about four times now and it's been reasonably different each time (mostly due to the insanity of coop).
The things what are kind of interesting:
Clips! You reload after firing a bullet? Too bad, you lose that clip. Boy, I've missed this feature from games. And I bet people fucking hate it. But it's awesome and I love it.
Hacking is kind of cool, and kind of a game into itself. If you like games that are basically spreadsheets. I really like spreadsheets. I'm making the hacking sound better than it is, which is probably a bad thing, because it really isn't that good. It's just kind of better than most implementations of it in modern games.
These things are like eating boners and are also bad:
The coop. Well, alright. This probably needs more explanation before I get into the bad things. I really dig coop, and so far AusGAF have managed to get a five player server going and it's been a nice kind of chaotic fun beating a mission at its highest difficuilty / respawn rate in about 15 minutes. I've played the first city mission with five, four, three, two and one player(s), and it's been kind of different each time. I'll say right away the best way to play this game at the moment is singleplayer, simply because the game is way less prone to be completely ass broken.
The big issues I've come across are as follows:
If two people talk to the one guy, neither can exit the conversation and are forced to quit the game. On one occasion, this caused the dedicated server software to crash.
It's very, very hard to connect to someone's game. When trying to join through Steam, it tries to connect to a local IP address. While not entirely unexpected, I've also had to forward ports (and lots of them) on my router to get people to be able to join me, but that's kind of standard fare for a lot of MP hosting stuff.
When creating games with the dedicated server, it doesn't automatically load a map.
The game is real bad at tracking progress. As in, I don't know if it actually does track multiplayer progress. I don't know about everyone else, but I don't finish games in a sitting. Every time I've hosted a game, either via the dedicated server software or the in-game options, it restarts the entire campaign from the tutorial. I think AusGAF have played that tutorial about six times now.
It's possible to kill the guy in the dream world who you use to select the Master of Fate or whatever. This causes the game to be unstartable, as you need a master of fate to go through the door.
In the third level or so, me and my coop buddy got to the Exit objective, yet we were unable to complete the level.
If an elevator falls on you, you clip through the geometry and have no way of getting out (unless you enable sv_cheats 1 and noclip).
I think that's most of them, anyway. In short, the multiplayer is a bit of a mess. Especially the part where the game doesn't seem to load your proper state. It would be really helpful if your SP progress was synced with your Coop progress, or if you at least had the option to sync them, as it has made playing with AusGAF really annoying when we have to keep replaying missions.
Opinion:
I really like this game, in part because it's ambitious as hell and in part because it's actually kind of good. But the cooperative at the moment seems nearly unplayable, and even if it were, it's still way too fast compared to the Multiplayer. I suggest playing the SP before touching the MP if you have the chance, as that way I'd wager you'd get the most enjoyable experience.