1 hour later.
strange mix of excitement and disappointment.
graphics; very good ingame and replays, track looks wonderful, although playing from dvd (demo is still downloading from marketplace...wtf) i often get huge texture streaming issues which show how much of the scenery is actually a cleverly textured one polygon structure, nothing bad about it, just surprising.
Cars look good to very very good to not too realistic (someone above gave a spot on analysis on metallic vs non metallic, in the light vs in the shadow. he nailed it, imho, so i'm not typing that again).
First race was with a metallic red lancer and i really liked what i saw; looked very different from fm2 and closer to 'you know what'.
I shouldn't have cycled through custom cameras; while cars have an adequate # of polys in typical ingame and replay situations, closeups revealed how much lower poly they actually are compared to their menu/photomode representation...No model swapping my @ss
actual geometry for cars ingame is close to fm2, same goes for cars textures resolution.
Now, i shouldn't care, since the game does menage to look much, much better than fm2, but i can't help thinking T10 engine really needs a better lod menagement, and i can't help feeling somewhat cheated.
sound: crazy good. Not all cars have the same impact, but some of them definitely are the best sounding cars i ever heard in a videogame. Love menu tunes, like ingame soundtrack
gameplay: i don't know. Cars have crazy grip this time around, it's almost impossible to send a powerful rwd go spinning on launch or throttling out of a corner, which definitely happened a lot in fm2. Like i said, fm2 was probably too slippery and drift happy, but i don't know which is more realistic at this point. I really started thinking there might be a bug with some assists refusing to be switched off, because impressions and hands on depicted a different situation.
AI is very entertaining and good. Races are intense, although the cpu still tends to drive a lot more carefully (read:slow) than necessary around corners, it still can react to situations and surprise you with different driving styles..
Overall, game looks and feels very different from fm2, not entirely sure that's for the best yet