I am abso-freakin-lutely stunned, and I don’t use the word abso-freakin-lutely lightly. I had seen some stills and the E3 promo trailer, but they do not do this game justice. The video I saw was not the greatest quality, but it was still apparent that the poly count, animation, and the lighting were worlds beyond anything we’ve seen before in a video game. Muscles and veins were visible beneath skin, there were no sharp edges where they shouldn’t be, and the map looked amazing; dust, fog, sparks, and swinging light fixtures casting incredibly realistic moving shadows. It was close to the quality of the ill-fated Final Fantasy movie.
Graphics aside the game looked damn fun to play. The weapons I saw were standard doom/quake fare, peashooter, machine gun, and my fav the shotgun (will it ever be passé to implant a cartridge of buckshot into a ghoul’s head from point blank?) The enemies I saw were two types of generic looking zombies, some monster with feline movements that can teleport, walk on all fours or two feet, and can pounce on you from across a room, possessed marines with chainguns and whips, a giant, fireball tossing behemoth, and a four-legged worm thing that burst through a wall.
From what I saw I don’t think Id is shooting for originality here, everything I saw can be traced back to other survival/horror shooters especially HL and of course Doom itself. This game isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just perfect it. If I could make one request to Id: Big, badass bosses! I mean huge, and plenty of em. I was expecting a lot from this game, but this was beyond anything I had imagined. I can’t wait to play it. Time to start saving for an upgrade.