I have played about two fours of game so far, but a lot of it was replaying a forest area because I was trying different things. I found the game seriously impressive and very captivating. I *really* enjoyed playing it so far and I think something must be massively going south later on in the game to warrant such mixed reviews. To compare, I was bored to tears with the first two hours of BF3 and just couldn't keep playing it beyond that. KZ3 I powered through and disliked almost every moment of it, just wanted it to be over (MAWLR battle was fun though ) BF4 seems like more of that really, just kind if how KZ3 was, soulless machismo that they just didn't know how to pull off.
KZSF seems well above that so far, story may be kind of cliched and at times confusing, but not offensively dumb. More importantly, it plays like a dream. Controls are nigh perfect, Owl is fun to use, lots of freedom of what you can do and how to fight the enemies. First weapon that you get is so much fun to use with its chargeup alternate mode.
And yes the graphics - the game is simply phenomenal looking. I had my expectations tempered a bit by some if the reviews, I was expecting something to be off visually since reviews didn't seem to go crazy over it exactly. But now I'm left wondering WTF were they playing, as the game looks simply phenomenal both in tech and art direction. It looks incomparably better than KZ3, just literally not even worth mentioning in the same breath. NPC are animated practically better than anything I've seen, everything feels so full, solid, impressively lit, super detailed, atmospheric effects everywhere. The game is literally gorgeous, the area when the forest starts gave me that feeling that first Halo gave me, when you're dropped into nature in the alien world and have to fight for yourself through it. Best of all it's very cohesive, there's nothing that you can point at and say ah-ha, this ruins it! AA solution they're using is crazy good, there's been maybe one place in the game so far where I've noticed aliasing without actively looking for it. Hell, I was even looking for it in one place with the mesh wires, and even there I had to go through some extremes to make it look shimmery. AF is there but it's probably 4x. If I had to single out one thing that's lacking visually, that would be it. At rare times ground looks less than sharp thanks to this, but since the ground is almost always covered with geometric detail or some shader effects, this really rarely becomes a visible issue. Framerate so far never dropped below 30, it seems like it hovers more around 40 actually which gives the game nice smoothness and responsiveness. I don't mind it not being locked as in FPS I don't think the cinematic presentation matters as much.
The one in 8 is the one most people have problems with...
