First and foremost, I’m playing this on PC, I choose PC for this title because I’m not really playing anything on PC at the moment, and It will give me something to do when I don’t have access to the PS3. That said, there are certainly some aspects of this game that seem to be better laid out to play with a controller in your hand. Particularly anything that has a menu. Most things you’d expect to be able to click on and perform some sort of interaction with or some button would activate that you can click on with your mouse, but you can’t, it’s mostly click and hit some predefined keystroke. For example, in your friends list, to invite someone, first you click on them, and then you hit “I” to invite. In an intuitive interface, I’d expect a double click, or even a right click context menu to invite a friend to a game would be expected. When it comes to accessing menus in combat (which you may have to if you’ve unloaded all your ammo in all of your equipped weapons), you’re taking your hand off the mouse to navigate things that should generally be a simple click and drag action.
Secondly… It uses gamespy… why?.. I feel like I’m playing Quake 2 again. On top of that I spent the first couple hours of my game time last night troubleshooting connection problems. I’m hoping it was related to a spike in usage due to the launch. Once I got connected all was well. The voice communication is bad… my advice is to setup a vent server somewhere (on your personal machine is fine), you’ll never have more than 4 people connected anyway the bandwidth consumption is next to negligible. I literally did this in less than a minute yesterday including the time it took to download and install the software, and configure my router for traffic), and saves a ton of headache with the lack of features in the in-game system.
No trade system? No way to show off your items to people in the game? whats the point of loot hording if the only way you can show someone what you have is to take a screenshot and find some place to host it and then convince someone to go look at it, or simply drop it and hope they don’t steal it from you.
Those sound like a lot of gripes, none of these are deal-breakers for me, I’ll probably only be playing online with friends I trust so whatever, I’ll get used to the menus I guess, and the network problems went away, and there is an interim solution for the VC problem. It’s certainly worth getting over because the game is really fun, especially playing co-op. Getting a huge crit with a sniper rifle is satisfying, and scrambling to down a huge swarm of baddies creates some great panic moments. If this keeps up, I’ll have trouble not recommending this game to anyone, though I would probably recommend the console version to anyone outside of my circle (otherwise they need to get PC version so we can play).
