Excellent Game ! I know I said I won't be playing it while I wait for my LE to arrive, but seriously the game so good & gripping that I couldn't resist...and I played 2 episodes straight away (took me 2.5 hours). The writing is really great in this game & so is the sound design/music, really gives me the creeps. While the voice acting may not be as good as other games but its convincing enough. The best part of the game are the environments they are sooooooo well done that you're just going to get sucked into the game & loose track of time just because you always want to see more & more....kudos to Remedy for getting this part spot on !
The Gameplay is good but the combat is kind of clunky imo, I started on Hard & I found some places very difficult. The game hints you in loading screens that you should just run away if you are way outnumbered but the problem is my character couldn't run for more than 10 meters & these enemies can teleport & seem to have unlimited supplies of axes to throw. Ammo supply is "just right" so any wastage means you will fall short of ammo & special items like flare gun & flares are pretty scarce for now, but atleast the game makes sure to give you plenty of batteries for your flashlight. The driving sequence is, well....laughable.
Now on to the visuals....first off, the game is a nice looker overall & the subHD resolution doesn't seem to effect it "that" much ; aliasing is surprisingly quite minimal here, shader aliasing & some aliasing on edges covered with fog/mist were probably the only cases where its obviously noticeable. Lightning,Fog & mist are great and lastly interactive foliage ! finally a console game where interactive foliage is done right. The animations for movements & facial expressions are okay at best. I must stress that the game looks extremely nice in the night sequences, switch to day sequences & the cover's blown....daytime sequences are easily the area that gets affected the most due to the low resolution.
That said the textures are really low res & specularity on metals is quite off...almost makes them look plastic.Light volumes have noisy edges, shadowing while not jagged are still poor with dithering & lots of noise/flickering and they also seem to have their LOD switch occur as soon as the player move just 3 meters from them. One thing that I'd like to mention about the lighting here is that the light volumetric are really odd in this game, most of them don't seem to create any kind of shafts if you try to block it partially with objects in environments or your playing character, till now I've seen just 1 light source in total that created shafts when I tried to partially block it.
All in all an awesome game the blurry visuals will bother you for 10 minutes or so but after that you'll be so much into the game that you'll totally forget about it.
I just can't wait for my Limited Edition to arrive ! Thanks Remedy, I am a happy customer
P.S.[About the tearing, the game seems to tear even in places where there's nothing going on...I've seen it tear madly when I drop a flare or if I have a "healing" light source in front of me]