Iceman346

I got the Kickstarter Achievement yesterday shortly after starting the game. About at the same time as the popups for finishing the extra downloads came up.

I actually think Bioware did that one right IMO the male/female Shepard options in ME show how it could be done. In the end the main difference is, that you need two voiceactors doing all the lines, you have to change the romance options about a bit, you have to rewrite some dialogue to refer to the player characters sex and (perhaps the biggest job) you have to create all the armor graphics for male and female characters. Yes it is additional work but imo creating your own character is a big and important part of every RPG. While I could accept the small amount of options AP gives I would have been happier if there was more choice. Being able to play a female agent and more character customization is my biggest wish for a sequel, if we ever see one.

While I personally share the sentiment that AP is better than ME2 this will largely depend on your personal impressions of that game. For me ME2 was a big letdown after the first game as Bioware threw out most of the RPG aspects to make a 3rd person shooter with dialogue, cobbled together an irrelevant and mediocre main storyline (the companion quests were quite good on the other hand) and garnished it with horrible scanning and traveling mechanics.

I just finished the game, it took me about 20 hours without much rushing (read every mail I got, read the mission debriefings, listened to most of the news). The game certainly isn't the longest RPG out there, but it's not terribly short (for comparison: ME2 took me 25 hours, Dragon Age 55 hours). AP certainly has it's weak points, the enemy-AI varies between fine and laughable, the hacking minigame is atrocious while the other two minigames are ridiculously easy and I'm not a big fan of the interaction point stuff instead of giving the player free roam of the levels. But AP succeeds in telling an interesting story filled with interesting characters (most of which you can kill, yay ) and offering the player a lot of choice. Both regarding his playstyle and regarding the route the story takes. I certainly will play the game at least once more to try some other choices along the way. The shooting gameplay isn't the most polished I've seen, but it works decent enough while sneaking is a bit more erratic (although I have to admit, that I didn't put many points in sneaking, will do that next time). On the other hand updating your various weapons and gear is a lot of fun. To compare the game to it's nearest rival: For me AP is the better game than Mass Effect 2. While ME2 has a lot more polish and the shooting gameplay works better Bioware threw out most of the RPG-elements which made ME1 fun and the main storyline of ME2 is laughingly bad.

Just as an addendum: I tried the "fix" (modifying the Min/MaxSmoothedFramerate) and it certainly improved things. The game is still stuttering sometimes but not nearly as bad as before. On the downside the 30fps limiter when using 20/30 as values is not very eye-friendly. I'm now using MinSmoothedFrameRate=10 MaxSmoothedFrameRate=45 this still reduces the stuttering greatly but a 45 fps limit is more reasonable than using 30 fps.

It is a genuine problem. I bought a digital download from direct2drive.co.uk and I have the mouse problem.