[BreakABone]

Some impressions from GAF.

The Conduit feels really good to play. The team employed a really interesting (maybe controversial in a minor way) decision to heavily limit the Y-axis aiming--so you can't look straight up, for example. This does mean the gameplay won't be particularly vertical--Corso noted that level design is of course affected by that choice--but it makes you feel hugely more stable and in control. [EDIT: Just to clarify this, you can aim as far as you want up on the screen, but you can't move the entire camera up very far.]

Basically, you never get that thing that I even got in Metroid Prime 3, which I did really love as a game, where your cursor goes gets sort of "stuck" at the edge of the screen and you start spinning around. The Conduit's controls are very tuned to the point where the game does a lot of work smoothing out your aiming and keeping everything even.

There's a nice array of weapons, including pistols, zoomable rifles, a gun that shoots what is essentially a bolas made out of energy, and a thing that acts like the Half-Life 2 rocket launcher that you can guide after firing with the cursor.

Design-wise, I would say the biggest thing to improve at this point would be creating a little more visual guidance through levels--I had a few times where I'd kill all the enemies in an area, then not be sure where to go next, until I finally noticed a hole, or an open door, or something. Some of the city environments have sort of a Half-Life 2 vibe--so if the developers take any further influence from that series, that would be a good place to do it.

It looks quite nice--obviously you aren't going to be mistaking it for a 360 or PS3 game, but is genuinely good-looking. I fought a pretty large normal-mapped multi-legged boss that was pretty unusual for the system, and there were no framerate drops I saw there either. I also didn't notice any loading throughout the whole level I played, which is nice.

Apparently the game is largely content-complete, but there are about nine months left of development, and the team will be doing optimization passes among other things. I don't know if it's going to blow the doors down in terms of revolutionary FPS game design (it still has that kind of "find an area that happens to be populated with a bunch of aliens, kill them, move on" thing going, but so do a lot of other games), but as far as taking advantage of the Wii graphically and control-wise I'm pretty sold.

It was a lot of fun just using the controls--and, thankfully, unlike most console shooters regardless of system, you can remap every single button. (Why doesn't every game do this? Come on now.) I didn't get a chance to look at the options for tweaking the remote dead zone and all that, but I was promised that's pretty extensive as well.

Anyway, looking forward to it, we'll see how the whole thing shapes out.


EDIT: I forgot to mention the locking on. The lock on is sort of like Prime 3's expert mode, where the camera locks to the enemy but the reticule doesn't, except it's even softer--so the camera isn't hard-locked either, it just sort of roughly focuses on the enemy. It works really well, and makes locking just feel like a slightly more focused version of regular aiming, rather than a separate "mode."

And a control modifier video from IGN..

http://wii.ign.com/dor/objects/14248...adjust_07.html

And seems like IGN has new hands on gonna read now.