I'm in a risky mood, so I'll go against the grain.
Level Design:
My first concern was the ease of navigation. For a Linear level that could be classed as a winding corridor, I found it slightly shocking that some areas were too dark to notice things such as switches, and also the ever-frequent collision issues. Since when do you have to crouch to walk down some stairs?
I know that you run a high spec PC, and for the most part I was doing alright on my pretty low rig, running around 18-25 FPS. That said, there was a frequent "momentary lockup" while randomly running around, similar to the small pause before the videos (which I will come back to in a sec...). A certain staircase near the end which led to nothing but a locked door had me lagged out, so much that I had to walk up the staircase backwards just to see if the locked door was worth a look.
Other than that, I found the level fairly decent looking, albiet repetative; I couldn't held the feeling of
déjà vu after the second staircase, and a quick browse in the entitybank showed me you're mainly relying on third-party media, not necessarily custom, so you might want to work on making some of your own entities to spice the place up a bit and give it more of an "original" feeling.
Shaders:
Secondly, I was a bit concerned about the use of the shaders. It's no recent discovery that FPSC has some shader issues, and the fact that you've bragged many new shaders had me intrigued, but I ended up thinking they'd been a little "haphazardly" used.
Several doors for example had a pretty unusual shader which decided to light up or darken based on which direction I was looking. It kinda bugged me because it didn't really serve a purpose other than "look a shader on the door".
The shaders on the enemies didn't really give a horror effect either, they rather looked like they'd worked up a mild sweat chasing me down. Which brings me to my next point;
Enemies:
Kudos to CheeseCake for the model, it looks pretty freaky, but they didnt fit all that well. They were too clean for such a gritty environment, and didn't really work well with the "sightjack" (which I assume is borrowed from Forbidden Siren, although FPSC doesn't really manage to pull it off).
I know you seem fond of the "Sightjack" idea, but for me it killed any kind of suspense. As I saw it, my regular gameplay was interrupted with basically "spoiler" videos of something creeping up on me, and the only shock I got from them was upon turning round and noticing that a huge flesh coloured blob can
chase me while apparently ignoring any kind of cieling collision...
Overall atmosphere and other stuff:
There were 2 things which I was impressed with in the demo. One was the sound effects, I thought they worked well (although you might want to change the sightjack sounds, they sounded like a painful and distorted bedroom adventure, if ya get what I mean...). The second was the FOV effect using Airmod, nice effect there, could have been a nice addition to Umbra.
I know it's a zombie game, and it's bound to be followed by a reasonable amount of cliché, but some of that demo was
bathed in it (I'm looking at you, little girl sound effect). It just seem's to contradict the idea of doing something new with the engine, if you follow.
Anyway, I think that's enough for now, sorry for the apparent harshness, it's all in the name of contructive criticism, right?
Paul
