If you enjoy gameplay over graphics then you will enjoy it. There is no psychological phenomena around it. I told you the pure facts. It has gameplay with lots of different options and a lot of variety. With all these puzzle games and physics, the destroyable environment and the fun it is in the end a good game.
If you need perfect graphics and you just watched all these E3 trailers, then you might be disappointed about the Unreal2.5 technology behind it. It still offeres ambient occlusion, static and dynamic shadows, normal spec mapping, dof and motion blur, but the models and animations differ in quality in some levels.
There was indeed hype around it. But the hype-infected turned into haters after its release because of their high expectations. People like me who just expected another Duke game love it like it is.
Another problem is: This game is technically not really comparable with these new games. It is from another era. That is the same as if you try to test an old cult car from the 60s or 70s today. It would fail each test because of missing technology and missing security features. But it might be fun to drive it. And fun is actually what this game makes right. But really, the humour is not for everyone, some people feel pissed because of it. Some women in the USA already fight against this game and bring it to the court.
Besides that this game is on number one in sales statistics all over the world, here in Germany, at Steam and in other places. But I think half of them really enjoy it while the other half bought it only because of the hype and will turn into haters. So you will find 2 big emotional groups all over the internet hating and loving it.
While I personally enjoyed it, I still have the guts to admit, that it could be made better with good old health packs, quicksave, more open level design and with more weapons on the hero's shoulders. Because of that it is not a perfect game, but it is still a fun game, better than each rail-shooter out there.
And yes, I was talking about the single-player experience. In terms of multiplayer I prefer Left4Dead 2 anyway
Another sad finding of this DNF debate for me is: When a good game, that is longer than today's shooters and offers more variation than these shooters gets such bad rating then they would rip our small indie games apart. I mean, shooters like Crysis2 are really simple compared to DNF, better looking, but no gameplay and no humour and no fun. And still, these games get better rating.
This shows very clearly that graphics sell games better than gameplay and it probably ends the debate that raises over and over in this forum.
