Project IGI First Look

UPDATE: We do have to apologize to our readers for reviewing the demo with low-res textures on. Here's an e-mail from Lead Artist Olav-Rasmus Vorren, which should explain the whole misunderstanding.

Hello

I just read your review of the IGI demo. You mentioned blurry textures, and this might be because the "performance slider" is in the wrong direction (because you mentioned blurry textures, which isn't the case)

Another thing I saw from the screenshots was that there are no lightmaps on the indoor environments - which makes me certain that the performance slider is in the wrong direction.

This has been a common problem with the demo, and we realize that it was quite foolish of us to have it like this. We have fixed this now, and the slider is called "Graphics detail" instead. Hope that you can test the demo with max graphics detail - because the game looks much (!) better.

Have a great weekend,
Yours,
Olav-Rasmus Vorren Lead Artist - Project IGI

And finally, here's a few screenshots from the demo with the slider set to "best image quality:"

PS The ground textures still look blurry to us, although the indoor textures look MUCH better. The important thing is, the game does look much better overall. The only real problem is the very low FPS on our test system (PIII600, 128RAM, GeForce). I think the game runs at about 10-15 FPS in max. detail 1024x16bit. Still, this is only a demo.

Innerloop studios and Eidos combined their talents to design a new exciting shoot-em-up. Project IGI is a mission-based 3D first-person game with an accent on special forces infiltration type o' sneak-shoot gameplay. You find yourself in the role of a NATO operative named "Jones" who has a task to seek out the mad Russian ex-KGB colonel. The Russian colonel (a female by the way) stole a nuclear weapon from a NATO base storage silo (amazing, never heard that one before). Of course, you only get to play one mission in the demo, but the full game will feature a variety of 20 missions throughout Eastern Europe.

A demo's a demo. Nonetheless, this one surely needs a bit more work on it. Although we fully realize the game uses a modified flight sim. engine, the textures are plain, blurry, simple and low-res. The whole thing would look excellent... from ten thousand feet I guess, but as it stands... let's just say I've seen crisper images in a 3D engine. The demo was tested on a Pentium III 600 Mhz with a nVidia GeForce graphic card and the frame-rate was extremely low. Unfortunately, the demo is abundant with low poly objects and poorly detailed models. The weapon textures are good, and they surpass the ones in say, Land Warrior, although they are not on the same level as the ones we saw in Counter Strike. The whole gameplay is mission based and similar to Thief, but with a military SAS operative twist.

You have an average military assortment of weapons at disposal. The unavoidable army knife & desert gun, Draganov, LAW 80, the AK 47, UZI, the old and always appreciated Colt, and an excellently accurate sniper-rifle. Beyond the standard weaponry, you also have a few additional items; like the binoculars, a small computer map of the area, and a first-aid injection. The computer map, (or GPS tracking system), can be zoomed in to a certain extent. Your binoculars have a virtually unlimited zoom. The accurate sniper-rifle doesn't miss from a mile away so you won't have any problems there.

To our immense satisfaction, you cannot kill your opponent with a MP5 from half a mile away, like in Delta Force Land Warrior. It will take more than a few shots for eliminating each enemy, unless of course you can pull off a headshot. The AI routine is fairly good. The enemy will sometimes be stupid enough to fall for the peek-retreat move; although in some cases and situations your cunning foe will use a somewhat unorthodox method of approaching you. If he estimates that it's too dangerous for a frontal attack, then he will cleverly sneak behind your back and ice you on the spot. Using weapons with silencers is also highly recommended, because the enemy can hear (even from a great distance) when you're shooting an AK 47 or a UZI. One small discrepancy is that the firing rate of SMGs seems unusually high, even though Uzi's in real life do have an extremely high firing rate.

Eidos announced an particularly detailed storyline followed with tons of original and exciting missions to complete. Although I cannot imagine someone coming up with a radically innovative story now when there are so many military based shoot-em-ups. I mean we've seen it all before, and there's hardly anything more to be said about this popular game genre (That's what you think -Ed). They also mentioned an outstandingly realistic physical world. The game will respond to the player's commands in a unique fashion. Unfortunately, in the demo we can observe the famous zero gravity technique, that allows you to jump up, and then... er, fall after 5 secs!

You will be able to drive everything from ordinary cars, motorbikes, tanks, APC's, trucks, to trains. The most thrilling feature is the possibility of driving a military helicopter. It is probably because of this fact that the game's textures look extremely poor. As I've mentioned earlier, IGI was strictly designed with a heavily modified flight simulation 3D engine, which is definitely an awkward approach. While playing the demo we noticed that the ground looks so smudgy and blurry, that it doesn't even deserve to be compared to some of today's crisp texture work.

Finally, we hope that Innerloop Studios will add something more stimulating, than just rushing after ammo depots and enemy storage dumps in the full release. I'm sure they will, it's just that, well, this one mission we played doesn't look awfully promising, at least from a tech point of view...