Less boring edition here: http://www.youtube.com/wat
It's a very common thing for developers to copy their ideas. It is also very common for the developer to not improve upon that idea one iota, just reskin it and make changes. Not improvements. Changes. It takes a developer that's at least good to realize that if they're going to manufacture the same thing they can at least work on what surrounds the formula.
A brown-haired, brown-eyed, slightly unshaven all-American mute badass is sent into the ravaged territory of an evil world power and must use guns and supernatural powers to fight alongside a bunch of people who do nothing but tell him what to do against large forces of grunts and monsters in order to save the world. If this sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking of Wolfenstein 2009 right now, Raven Software's previous piss-awful shooter. This is also the exact same formula for Singularity. The only thing is that Singularity is remarkably better in quite a few ways that count, making Raven a good developer if you involve proving things by the use of science. They aren't a great developer. They were, but considering how few games I have to look forward to, I will gladly shelter a good one.
In Singularity, Captain Nate Renko, a brown-haired, brown-eyed, slightly unshaven all-American mute badass is sent into the ravaged Katorga 12, a territory of Russia, an evil world power, and must use guns and supernatural time-travel-based powers to fight alongside a bunch of people who do nothing but tell him what to do against large forces of grunts and monsters in order to save the world. That is the gist of the entire story right there. The characters are also just mission dispensers with no real character development for the most part. However, despite the been-there-done-that setup of the whole thing, the actual narrative is incredibly creative. The game is well-paced and does a fantastic job at thrusting the player into imaginatively spectacular and diverse set pieces.
The gameplay consists of everything Wolfenstein had minus the dumb useless sandbox. Nearly everything is about the same quality as it as well except for what actually matters in a Raven game: the shooting. However, I would like to take a minute to focus on the smaller aspects that are still trash for the most part.
Puzzles are, as always, straightforward crate-stacking or time-stopping roadblocks that often repeat themselves, more to cater to the console gaming kiddies who don't realize they've done the same thing thirteen times before than anyone else. Of course, if you've seen any preview videos at all, you'll have noticed that and you'll be buying this certainly not for the puzzles.
There is a pretty actually useful upgrade system that allows for certain powers to be expanded upon, but nothing becomes ridiculously overpowered and so much of an end-all-be-all that you use it and nothing else. Unfortunately, they took a lot of good quality out of their formula for a superpower shooter: the fact that your money for upgrades is finite. I am an exploraholic, and since exploring in this game is not much of a challenge at all, I had nearly all power upgrades possible installed by the end of the game.
Other upgrades are for weapons, and they happen to be much harder to trip over but are rather useless. The upgrades are the same for each weapon. Magazine size and reload speed don't matter as much to a skilled sniper with his hands on a rifle as much as they do to someone with an AR, so that's where uselessness comes into play.
As for what matters, the combat, for most of the game, the player will be fighting off various monsters, and that right there is the selling point of the game. It isn't particularly a horde shooter like you would find in the older id Software catalog but still pulls off large groups of instinctually different enemies. Each creature type has its own tactical bit of creativity put into its design. One monster class will sprint at and charge the player and knock his living daylights out of him when he's unprepared while another can become invulnerable for a short amount of time and flank him.
Boss battles are also handled in awesome ways, but Raven don't receive any awards for having awesome boss fights anymore. It's just that these don't just feel great, they play well too. Two out of three of them required me to fight them with all of the techniques learned previously with the Time Manipulation Device and a little wit and then some.
Occasionally a few Russian soldiers will appear and will need to be killed, and there's nothing that great to talk about. The enemies aren't total idiots. They are rather intelligent about when to take cover and throw grenades but nothing apart from a few scripted sequences could come close to convincing anyone that they are all that intelligent in terms of flanking or other nice flavors of combat.
However, despite the overall niceness of the combat, the game's difficulty curve is pretty screwed up. I played on the hardest difficulty level and found that the hardest part of the game was the introduction. Enemies are vicious throughout, and on the hard level the first enemies that I faced took out half of my health with each strike, and without any upgrades, medkits do not do a very generous job of keeping someone healthy. Combine this with the fact that the player is given a revolver with limited ammunition and a slow rate of fire and you have an incredibly tense atmosphere.
The thing is that it should have stayed that tense, with ammo that does not grow on trees, bushes, and even blades of grass, or not been that tense at all. After that, it turns into a different kind of shooter entirely. It's still good with the aforementioned kickass monster fights, but it's a shame that the unique feeling of being on a deserted, mutated island with an exploding DeLorean in the center got scrapped after about twenty minutes. The difficulty is overall something most good gamers can handle but what if I want to play a game that makes me feel special for my survival prowess throughout?
As for the rest of the difficulty curve, one or two boss battles may have to scratching your head for a little while. There are also gigantic spikes in the difficulty every time the player encounters these tick things, the first scene with them stumping the hell out of me until I realized I had to use my deadlock ability that slows time in a certain radius in an incredibly professional manner, something very hard to do since it happened right after I was first given the power.
That said, the combat is overall a solid "good" and the narrative is a solid "fun" as well. The sad thing is that though the monsters and twists and turns the narrative takes are both well-done there is nearly no work put into anything else. The phrase that could best describe the manner in which the game tells its story would be "American Cryostasis," a story about stuff falling apart because of the sins and faults of their creator told through ghostly flashbacks, notes, and an unbelievable amount of audio logs, except minus a ton of symbolism and mystery and intriguing characters and all of the plot devices are incredibly, annoyingly, conveniently placed. So let's actually scrap the idea of it being an "American Cryostasis" and call it what it really relates to: "BioShock 2: Temporal Boogaloo."
The game also contains a sense of style if that sort of thing matters to you. The design aesthetic is an intentional sort of cheap, which will definitely make a few Russkiys go batshit insane about how Raven butchered their alphabet and mixed up some history, but I really like how it's done. It was the developer's intention to make the art style resemble that of a United States propaganda film from the 1950's mixed with science fiction elements from cinema of basically the entire first half of the twentieth century, with all of the gaudy machinery and mishandled backwards R's you can imagine.
Singularity is also basically a very pretty-looking game. The Unreal Engine lends its slightly modified self for really cool special effects and that's about it. The visuals really shine because of the actual colorful environments and amazing animations, especially those that happen when enemies are hurt. Watching a legless mutant writhe in pain while still trying to attack anything that moves is satisfying enough to justify shooting it. I just hope that some day someone will change the fact that it takes forever for textures to fully load on the Unreal Engine, and it happens a real lot in Singularity in particular. However, I'm guessing it's because of the gigantic lack of loading screens, which is always a pretty cool thing to brag about.
If you're looking forward to buying Singularity because you think it will expand upon its intriguing premise in a number of interesting and cool manners feel free to be disappointed, but if you're thinking any Raven game can have a good story you're living in the past. Ten years in the past to be precise. What's cool about Singularity is the way it pushes the player through various neat set pieces and boss battles by way of a totally freakin' awesome thrill ride through time. You will be buying to see awesome monster combat with unique weapons involving time manipulation and with that said it's a one-trick pony, but it's a pony that can jump ten feet in the air and do a somersault.
I'd certainly like to see a real pony do that. Especially without its jockey getting harmed.
