I have to say some places in the game has been very polished. Things react the way you imagine they would and since cutscenes are the same in Half-Life, where bad things happen to you in first person, really increases the immersion in this game. Without spoiling much, at one point you get weighed down, you can't run and you feel very serious momentum when you look around and aim.

What the fuck?  And yet the recommended config is a quad-core octo-threaded i7 CPU.  I love people...

Notice anything unusual about the listed GPU requirements?

Minimum: DirectX 9, Shader Model 3 compliant graphics cards (GeForce 8800, GeForce GT220 and above)

Recommended: DirectX 10 compliant graphics card (GeForce GTX 260 and above)

Optimum: NVIDIA DirectX 11 compliant graphics card (GeForce GTX 480 and 470)

This game is Nvidias poster child for the Fermi... Nividias forums are all praising it for this reason.

I'm definitely posting a Fermi thread next week, mostly so I can link to all of Charlie's articles starting from last May to show how right he was.

Maybe.

I mean, it's just possible they have a good card and Charlie is wrong.

So I finished the game. The story is awesome, except the ending is kinda disappointing. Not that the ending itself was disappointing, it's just that there was so little explained in the end. The game however is amazing. It's a very fresh feeling, and I enjoyed it greatly, definitely the best game so far out this year. I haven't finished GoW3, but let me put it this way, I dropped GoW3 midway so I can play this to the end.

I didn't count too much, but the amount of enemies in the game is sizeable. New enemies were being introduced all the way up until the last level, however adversities would be brought up and then almost never used again later in the game. The game could have been so much longer than it is that it's almost a shame. At the same time it took me about 15 hours to finish on hardcore, so if you die less it's probably about 10 hours. But damn they were the most amazing 10 hours in the last several years of gaming. I just really wish the game was longer of the same quality, it definitely could have been. I didn't get the hang of all the different mechanics, especially the stealth, almost up until the end. Having completely mastery over the stealth and going around killing people with throwing knives rambo style was extremely satisfying.

Overall, calling this game an FPS would be quite unfair, yet it's the best description we have of it. It's as much an FPS as Deus Ex was and ultimately would have been as good as DE if it only had a few more mechanics in it and some more time of gameplay.

@jeff
I am not 100% sure but it seemed my CPU was running only at 50%, which means just 2 cores. Maybe I was just not reading it right or it dropped to two cores when alt tabbed but it was really 4 cores during gameplay.

@CGI
I highly doubt that is even remotely possible. My PC can push many times more polygons and shaders at a higher resolution than a 360 ever will be able to and I can't even play it on highest settings because when things get busy on screen my FPS drops to 20. Have to play it on High to have a consistent FPS over 40. Don't kid yourself, the 360 version can't even come close to the PC version in therms of graphics. Although reading some of the 360 reviews it seems that there's a lot more things inferior on the 360 than just graphics or, and this is far more probable to be honest, reviewers are just idiots.

In fact I can't believe how many of the reviewers didn't understand how the game worked. Just as an example, just about all of them say how throwing knives are inconsistent because sometimes they 1 hit enemies, and other times they just bounce off. If the reviewers weren't complete idiots they would have realized that the armor on enemies also falls under per-pixel hit detection, so for knives not to bounce they have to hit a spot not covered in armor.

Look at shots #3 and #7, because that's what the game is like for the most part, and it's clear that the 360 suffers from its hardware in it. Also there's a much larger resolution on the PC. Though it looks like thos pictures weren't screencapped but just pictured with a digital camera because I can't believe how you can have such large dark splotches.

Strange..

I have a 4gb Ram, 2.66ghz Quad core and a 8800gtx.. and mine handles the game on high without any major fps drops. But i agree that the game looks great.. but im not to sure about the story so far.

I said very high. High mine handles perfectly well.

For the record, here is what the developer states as the differences between PC and console:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-interview-metro-2033?page=4

Digital Foundry: Does PC hardware offer up any additional bonuses in Metro 2033 aside from higher frame-rates and resolutions?

Oles Shishkovstov: Yes and no. When you have more performance on the table, you can either do nothing as you say, and as most direct console ports do, or you add the features. Because our platforms got equal attention, we took the second route.

Naturally most of the features are graphics related, but not all. The internal PhysX tick-rate was doubled on PC resulting in more precise collision detection and joint behavior. We "render" almost twice the number of sounds (all with wave-tracing) compared to consoles. That's just a few examples, so that you can see that not only graphics gets a boost. On the graphics side, here's a partial list:

• Most of the textures are 2048^2 (consoles use 1024^2).
• The shadow-map resolution is up to 9.43 Mpix.
• The shadow filtering is much, much better.
• The parallax mapping is enabled on all surfaces, some with occlusion-mapping (optional).
• We've utilised a lot of "true" volumetric stuff, which is very important in dusty environments.
• From DX10 upwards we use correct "local motion blur", sometimes called "object blur".
• The light-material response is nearly "physically-correct" on the PC on higher quality presets.
• The ambient occlusion is greatly improved (especially on higher-quality presets).
• Sub-surface scattering makes a lot of difference on human faces, hands, etc.
• The geometric detail is somewhat better, because of different LOD selection, not even counting DX11 tessellation.
• We are considering enabling global illumination (as an option) which really enhances the lighting model. However, that comes with some performance hit, because of literally tens of thousands of secondary light sources.

Seems like a big difference if you have the hardware to take advantage of everything. If you look at some of the pictures on the hi-res PC screenshots thread on neogaf you can see how tessellation makes a difference.