I just bought the latest Official Playstation 2 Mag UK and they had a playable demo of Primal.

The screenshots posted around the web has made me lift an eyebrow but nothing more, after after the nearly 45 minutes of game-play the demo offers I am in love with Jennifer Tate. She is hot in all her high-polygon splendor, and a great bonus to the developers for not making her boobs size triple D and proving that a female game characters looks do not stand and fall with the breasts. Well now that is said :).

The graphics are very good, the character polygon-count is high and so is the texture resolution. The bast part is that this has been used not only to be able to brag about higher numbers in the hype but has actually been used to add great detail to the game, there was no problem at all for me to accept Jen, Scree or any of the other characters as real. Apart from the high polygon-count and attention to texture detail the lightening effects seams to be high on the developers priority list as well. Overall it feels very polished except for a few glitches that I will sum up last.

The sound are split into two. The music is great, I have never heard of the band 16volt who provided the score before but their NIN like sound fits the dark moody graphics perfectly. For most parts the music changes according to the game environment, adding to the tense when entering dark alleys or going into frenzy when attacked by demons. The sound effects are more I would say bland, they are far from bad it is just that they do not stand out much at all. They are there but leaves no deeper memory.

The game-play is pretty simple, walk with left stick press cross for actions and triangle to talk to the other character (You play both as Jen and Scree and change which to control by tapping select, the other character follows and obey commands). The real difference comes in battle where the shoulder buttons are used to launch attacks, both kicks, uppercuts and allot more. At first it was more tapping at random and it took a while before I mastered the controls and could intentionally select attack types and do combo attack. I fear that the combat controls is what might scare people away, it is not the usual bash-cross-until-enemy-is-dead controls but requires some thinking and practice.

The bad could very well be out of the picture at release. This demo was available in stores in late January (Yes imported mags takes time :( ), so the demo was most likely provided from developers a months earlier then that. Giving that the release has been postponed until April as the developers claim they aim for perfection could be a good sign. Anyway this is what glitches I found in the demo: The camera can get really confused in tight places making the game very hard to control. The game is somewhat picky when it comes to the AI of the non-play-controlled character, if Scree is ordered to pick up something he will give up if Jen stands in the way for the first try, where he could simply walk a few feet and easily pick it up from another angle. The characters are sometimes " jumpy" when they shall do an action, if opening a door Jen can jump into the middle of the door in a an instant where a more polished sidestepping animation would have been more appropriate. Combat mode is turn on and off using the square button, unfortunately combat mode can only be initiated if under attack, meaning even if Jen sees an enemy a mile away she can not turn combat on and rush up to it, but must wait for the enemy to see and attack before she can get into combat mode herself, very annoying.

Looks like a must buy for me anyway.

I played the demo from the mag also, but I must say I wasn' t impressed at all.

I know that the finished product could be vastly different from the demo, but I didn' t get good vibes from the demo at all.

Don' t quite know what it was. Maybe it was a bit Tomb Radierish for me.


I' ll maybe give the demo another chance.

I' ve had my eye on this game for a long while. I may end up renting it but I doubt I' ll buy though. There' s really only a handful of games that I' m looking forward to on PS2 this year, with Frequency 2 and DarkCloud 2 (out I know but I haven' t picked it up yet) at the top of the list.

I have played through the demo three times now and I still like it, have found a few nice " features" such as walking through walls and freeze the game when you do stuff the designers most probably did not intended (Most likely trying to get to places not meant to be explored in the demo).

I would not call the game inventive, it really do not bring anything new (besides a female character with character) to the gaming world. It do combine many old ideas in a nice new ways. And has a feeling that appeals to me tremendously.

I do not think renting it would be wise if you intend to complete it, it is to huge and probably would cost more to rent until finished then buying the game to start with. I do which there was a place nearby where I live that rented PS2 games, it is always nice to try out the game before buying and demos do not always tell the whole truth even when they do exists.

Cool demo impressions - thx Peylow.

We' ve had this game for a few weeks now, and now we' re allowed to review it... but the reviewer in question (not me) wants more time. So I think it' ll go up in about a week. It' s got mixed scores, but most mages have given it 8ish.

I wonder what JennieK thinks of Primal?