First impressions:
Setting – Fallout 3
Story – Fallout 3
Jumpsuit – Fallout 3
Enemies – Fallout 3
Hunters – Fallout 3
Mutants – Fallout 3
Textures – Fallout 3
Wasteland – Fallout 3
Vehicles – a plus
FPS Mechanics – a plus
Control – a plus

So just hopping into it briefly I get much the same feeling as I got with Fallout. Everything is a mess, and there are many reused textures. It’s hard to make a post-apocalyptic world. I don’t deny that. However – the mechanics of the shooting was uniquely id. It felt like no other in the way that you shoot. It was precise, it was exact, it just felt right. You didn’t just shoot off legs like in Fallout – you injured where you shot, so the enemy could limp, slump, double over, fall down… all depending on where you shot. The guy running after you will react differently to shots to the foot vs shots to the body.

I really liked that part. John Goodman is a great voice. I haven’t heard much dialog but he’s good at it, it makes for a pleasant change towards good voice talent in the game, however I think they could have used just anyone as the voice and done just as well. They could have also used the money to put some more time into things. The enemies will just fall down if they die, or get up and then die from their wounds and then fall down again. It just looks like they didn’t care that much about the modeling.

It’s good to see more games getting immersive by showing the hands as you fall or die, or jump over objects (BF3) but it doesn’t seem to fit the scale of everything else. It probably could have done without it but it would have fallen short of current expectations had they left it out.

I did not really see the textures fill in before me, but I did notice when they weren’t high quality. You’d be in a crystal clear canyon and then in a fuzzy small room, it didn’t make sense unless special things need to be done to skin a small object with a high quality texture. In any case I really want to try the texture tweak to prevent it from attempting to manage the textures itself. It puts the quality up/down depending on how well the system is currently doing. It’s not the best system, especially when you’re inside/out.

I could go on and on about the 15 minutes I played or I could just drop some screenshots and a video – here you go:

and even after the 16k CFG file enabling 16k textures (even better then the Carmack aforementioned 8k) I see blurry… pixel textures. Check out the roots hanging from the roof in the cave.