Next up there's Scott Alden, programmer on the game. He's put a lot of work together with the rest of the progamming team on the engine and its tools, allowing content to be created easily and quickly. Although the user community didn't get into the SiN engine as much as anyone had liked, it makes mods SO easy. If you can operate a Graphical User Interface you can make cutscenes, sounds, particle systems, and all kinds of things in the game, at any time, without even quitting out! Just restart the video and/or the level and your code runs. Tom uses it to make the cinematics and it looks very easy to work with.
Finally, I took some shots of everyone's favorite "FPS Survivar", Levelord(tm). Levelord has been putting some "phook"ing cool maps together, along with the rest of the mapping crew, and the third-person view really lets you see so much of the effort that was put into the game. It looks gorgeous, thanks to some serious art talent, and the maps really shine as well. The curved surfaces are used in such a way that I wasn't even really aware of them unless I actually stopped and looked at the architecture, but it makes the levels feel so realistic. There are all the little touches that make the locations seem real, and the programming department has put a lot of cool tools at their fingertips. You can look off into the distance and see meteorites hitting the planetary shield, or gaze off the edge of a cliff and see a river in the distance. Of course there are a lot of trap-type obstacles in FAKK2's early levels, but they are fun and always logical enough to have a pretty easy solution, once you figure out the weakness or pattern. And the jumps are pretty forgiving, so I didn't find myself falling unexpectedly a lot, and even if I did, the reload times are very short in this game, so saving and reloading is an easy task.
As far as gameplay goes, you'll start off the game in Eden, and everything's pretty peaceful. You get the chance to chase some Shgleiks around, and check out a house with some machinery jostling away inside. Then you go into the training area, where you can learn all about the HUD, the weapon categories, combos, using the slingshot to distract and stun (one of the game's useful tool/weapons), and loads of gameplay techniques, like making use of Julie's thousands of frames of animation to walk along ledges, hang from pipes and monkey bars, and jump onto cliffs. A really nice touch is that if you walk up to a cliff, you can't fall off, so as long as you don't run up, you can step right up to the edge and use the mouse to look over and see what's down below you. A really nice feature for this type of game.
After the training, (or if you skip it *cough*) you can return to Eden and look around, newly armed with a slingshot and sword. Knock out a Shgleik and throw him off the edge (or into the water, where they seem to become Gremlins-like Evil Shgleik) Then continue on, where you'll meet your first batch of enemies to overcome, and your first boss soon afterward, the vymish mama bug. FAKK2 has a lot of console-style boss monsters, where you get put into an area and must defeat the boss to get out, but it's not just "pull out your most powerful weapon and blast while strafing." You must use the environment to your advantage. It's a welcome change for boss design, and a lot of fun to boot. After this level, you'll encounter the first Eden-bound monsters, as you work to turn the planetary shield generator back on. You gain more powerful weapons along the way, and get your first glimpse at the Gith threat. Soon enough you return to the town to find some Gith already there... and then the real fun begins. I won't spoil any more, but you'll begin to put all your skills to the test.
All in all, I am even more excited to play the game now that I've had a mouthful in person than I was when I'd only seen bite-sized parts. Soon you'll definately get to see for yourself why FAKK2 was at the top of everyone's Best-Of list at E3!
A HUGE thanks to the Ritual guys for all they do
- LeftE
