My first suspect is RAM. I believe that you are hitting the memory limit during the load. Try opening the Task Manager during the game load and check how much RAM are used
Just remembered that this game exists and can happily say that the newest version runs flawlessly on my PC with the highest settings. No idea what was wrong with the old build but I'm glad to see my computer wasn't the issue and isn't simply too weak to handle it.
Great game from what I could tell with my first test. Will look into it further.