Just finished playing the demo.
Yikes.
I mean, there's so much wrong with this demo, I can't actually believed they released it -- and I say that as someone who is willing to bend over backwards to ignore a *lot* since I've been a Prey fan for a while now.
I guess, first, the technical front -- it's a mess. And yes, I know, "Oh, all that will be fixed in the final release!", but promises like that are pretty suspect to me considering the way things tend to go. The controls are, as stated over and over again, messed up -- but actually, that's not the biggest problem with them. They can fix the input lag, and it's still going to be a *pain* to actually control your character in this game. Movement is all-together too "heavy", and reacting to enemies that can zip around and hurt you with very little feedback is not very fun. Collision detection with the Gloo gun is way too strict. Sliding doesn't really gain you much mobility (and appears to be glitched on certain surfaces -- oof!), either. In general, input lag aside, it feels a bit too slow and clunky. Loading times are pretty bad, and a lot of aliasing reduces the image quality (not sure if this is a bad AA solution altogether, or maybe dynamic resolution at play?). Framerate was *mostly* stable, which was surprising given everything else, but some hitches in loading new areas aren't well-disguised.
Sound mixing seems really, really off. Some sounds blare through and are almost deafening, just like the awkward music which is astoundingly bad considering the talent behind it. Almost seems like there isn't really a vision beyond "Can you just make it sound high-tech with some beeps and boops and wubba wubbas?" -- it feels kind of out of place with the tense atmosphere the story is trying to establish. I won't complain about the fact that sometimes the music appears out of nowhere and lasts for long after the encounter, because I know they say they'll fix it, but you can't really fix something that tonally feels off. In Doom, a lot of the hardcore music worked because your character was *always* running about, snatching ledges, blowing shit up and ripping the guts out of just about everything; here you're just kind of jumping around, fighting oversized spiders that occasionally think they can trick you by becoming a cup (only to decide a mere fraction of a second later that that isn't going to fool you, and they go right back to their other form).
I encountered a lot of bugs with this system, by the way. Conceptually, I fucking love it, but one of these mimics turned itself into a canister, and then decided it would start floating about in a spiral path downward, until it eventually disappeared right through the ground. Thankfully, that meant I didn't have to fight it, which is something I tried to avoid in this demo given how bad the controls were, but still, that's *probably* not supposed to happen.
For being a CryEngine game, I'm underwhelmed by the visuals; UE3 probably would have been a better choice, and looked better too, despite it being an entire engine iteration behind. Still, it's the console version, so my expectations weren't all that high to begin with.
Other than the big "reveal" of the demo, and the general sense of exploration and environment being interesting, pretty much hated this. And sure, a lot of this stuff can be fixed in the final release, but maybe they should have considered releasing this build months ago with a nice "Pre-Alpha" tag on it or something to let people know it's in a real bad place. Most people will assume that this is representative of what they'll get in a few days, and I'd guess that if they thought that, they'd cancel their pre-orders based on this.
If the final product doesn't see some major overhauls (that *actually* fix the problems), this is going to be a real rough game. In fact, I'd say anyone that has a PC should get it on that instead to avoid some of the difficulties here, but considering the fact that there's *no* demo for PC, and that Bethesda won't allow reviews until day one, I would *reallllly* hold off on even that until we can get DF impressions or something.