2.
Nov 21, 2008 1:27 PM

in response to:
PCWorld
Re: Hands On with Square Enix's The Last Remnant
You bet Marlowe.
For anyone else reading, The Last Remnant is Square Enix's first tango with the Unreal Engine 3, the same engine powering games like Gears of War 2 and Unreal Tournament 3.
That said, it's running fine for me off a hard drive install. It does slow up in spots, especially during some of the in-engine cutscenes (the one where the protagonist's sister is abducted at the beginning stands out in memory here), else it's perfectly playable when you're moving around and diving in or out of battles.
The issue with loads might be related to the fact that there's so much loading all around. Those loads are quick but frequent, since you don't move through fully realized cities or world areas. Instead, you just jog between what I always think of as "area nodes." The upside is that you can navigate maps quickly. The downside is that even the map screen you have to invoke to pick a place to warp to takes a couple seconds to load.
Minor issues for me, really. Unless that changes further along, they wouldn't rise to the level of mentionable in an actual review.