nskinnear said:
Aw man, I missed it
Thanks anyway.
U didn't miss much. It turns out the preview code was more of a "demo preview code" as it lasted less than an hour. It did still allow me to check some stuff tho.
Clank-focused sections are now immensely more enjoyable than in previous iterations. This is for three main reasons.
1st, you can now do triple jumps hence platforming is much more enjoyable.
2nd, the time based puzzles are actually pretty genius and a joy to figure the solution out.
3rd, Clank is more combat ready thanks to his "time-staff" and the ability to slow enemy down using the slow-time bubble. (sorry for the custom terminology but I don't recall the actual names).
There was also a very cool level taking place in Clank "subconscious" with a nice effect going on on his floating platforms. Basically, each platform is made of a waving grid of cubes which linie up flat under Clank feet as he walks around. Hard to describe, but very cool to see.
Ratchet sections play out as you would expect them to, and those I went through in the demo (which covers the very beginning of the game) were very action packed with a nice amount of platform sections and wrench-based environment interaction.
And then there is the whole space combat thing. I have to say I wasn't too excited about the idea of being locked to just the horizontal plane, but in practice it works very well. Since you don't have to bother with Y axis, acceleration/deceleration and left&right rotation is all mapped to the left analogue stick (up and down to accelerate and decelerate) letting you do evading manouvers with the right stick (a la Warhawk with default flight controls). You can shoot cannons and homng missiles with R1 and L1 respectively while a radar in the corner keeps track of enemy position as well as moons and other stuff you can visit. I only did a couple of spherical levels which where pretty simple but quite a feat to behold thanks to the awesome space environment rotating around you as you go.
All in all, it all felt very "dense" gameplay-wise despite being the very beginning of the game, kinda like Quest For Booty was but with the prospect of a much larger game awaiting to be explored.
The only thing that had me disappointed is the frame rate. It NEVER kept 60fps. Actually, it was 30fps most of the time. Whenever there was some shooting action going on, frame rate simply dropped to 30fps. Since there was a lot of combat going on in these early portions of the game, average frame rate was closer to 30fps than 60fps. I hope this is all due to the code being old cos it honestly wouldn't make much sense to keep pushing for 60fps when most of the time you are looking at 30fps action anyway. At times it's really jarring to rotate the camera around and see it fluctuating as soon as some complexity comes into view.
Short version: great stuff, but fix the frame rate.
Edit- Forgot to add that the new smoke effects are as awesome as they look like in the "bullshots".
