Indeed, the demo is bug-city, but still enjoyable. First thought was kind of odd when I looked at the available resolutions. I was hoping to be able to pick 1680x1050, but 1024x768 @ 75Hz was my finest option. There was another, 11**x8** something, but I don't care much for resolutions other than the regular.
Ok, well, I picked 10x7@75, and went on my merry way. The intial load took atleast 5-6 minutes, as it was "optimizing" my shaders or whatnot. After it finally did that, and tried to connect to the server I had picked, it just sat there and sat there and sat there. I had to quit out, then come back. Once I did this, it loaded fine. I spawned on the battleship, and from here it was confusing. Not having played BF1942 for months/years, I felt a little disoriented. Add to that the clipping going on everywhere, and textures popping in and out. This continued throughout my play with the game, but I soon became used to it.
These are my bullet-point thoughts:
- Buggy texturing, this needs to be fixed.
- Netcode is initially laggy as hell. Frequently hopping around in a 20 foot circle on a server which tells me I have a 35 ping.
- Once again, the netcode needs to be fixed to allow better aiming. I unloaded a clip into a guy running circles around me, and never killed him. Trust me, I should have been hitting him.
- Vehicles are hard to drive, as they are buggy as well. Controls aren't tight enough, you just don't have much control with the driving aspect.
- What's with the bouncy fvcking camera while driving? Go over the slightest bump, and your view shifts violently up and down, overexaggerting the feeling of being inside.
- Now to the good stuff, the weapons have a nice punch to them. The reload animations are great, and the control feels tight when shooting.
- What can't I cook a grenade? Or atleast hold it before I throw it, just to have it ready when I pop around a corner? Might be something I'm missing, though.
- I love the animations of the flag going up and down the post when takeovers are taking place.
- I love being able to call for a medic while my spawn counter is timing down.
- Freaking spawn is sometimes buggy. More than a few times, when the timer hit 0, I did not respawn, only was kept staring at my dead body.
- Trying to right-click to choose a new class and spawn point is also buggy as hell. I often was unable to change parameters while waiting to spawn after death.
- Do not go into a level, and immediately try to fly over the map very quickly, unless you have a top-of-the-line computer. I did this, and everything was too slow to load, therefore choppy as hell, therefore I crashed into something in mid-air. Game couldn't take it apparently.
- The commanders seemed to be non-existant, but will hopefully become more useful once the best of the best come out of the woodwork.
At first, I was consistently at the bottom of the ranks after each match, but I slowly went up and up, eventually taking 2nd place with 3 takeovers, 11 kills, and 5 deaths. Decent stuff, but the current bugs in the demo make me try too hard to like it. I do, in fact like it, but hopefully the demo isn't respresentative of the final product coming out. If so, god speed to EA in getting a patch out quickly to resolve the most glaring bugs and issues.