Singularity For Pc Review

[Herbert1405241469 0]

I picked up Singularity for the PC the other day, and I'm about half way through it and thought I'd share my thoughts thus far.I did minimal reading up on this game before I purchased it, so the only thing I heard about it was that it was akin to a mixture of Bioshock, Timeshift, and some other games, and lacked originality... Well in these times how much more original can you get with a first person shooter?So the basic premise of this game is that a USA satellite has been destroyed over a small island near Russia, and the US Government is worried that another "Chernobyl Event" has occurred and wants to check it out. So, you and another soldier are sent in to investigate. Not getting too much into the story , but just typing that first sentence out made me think... If it was another nuclear explosion of some sort, why send in soldiers? Wouldn't that put their lives at risk? Why not send in a drone with radioactive shielding.... Anyway, not a major pet peeve or anything, but that just popped into my mind....So moving forward... You start off on a helicopter over the Russian island and are struck down by an apparent electromagnetic pulse. You start off by trying to find you fellow soldier and everything is quiet. You find notes to read giving you some insight on what happened on the island and why everything is ruined. There are a lot of details, so I've been moving at a snail's pace so I don't miss anything. Not to give away any spoilers, I'll keep my comments rather generic, because this is such a linear game, I can't really talk to much about it without spoiling stuff, and this is the type of game you'll play twice. Once for your first play through where everything is new and every surprise actually shocks you, and the second time to pick up on anything you missed the first time.Not reading anything about this game, I didn't realize how much of a horror-genre game this was... The overall creepiness can be compared to Metro 2033 and Bioshock. There will be creepy noises of movement around you that you can't pinpoint.... Flashes of creatures out of the corner of your eye... Oooh this game is creepy. The pacing is done rather well, with the lulls in gameplay for exploration, then sudden attacks. Overall feels like a Bioshock clone.There are weapons upgrade stations, and TMD upgrades which act similarly to the plasmids in Bioshock. The TMD is a handy dandy time manipulation device you get after a bit of gameplay. The thing with the TMD is that there are many different buttons you need to push for the different functionality you can get with this. As you play the game, you'll see TMD upgrade stations which add a new feature... such as creating a ball of stuff that basically freezes time to whoever is located within it's perimeter, or shooting a pulse out which acts like a melee. The problem is that in the middle of a fight, you have to scramble to remember which key does what, and using combo-type attacks, you find yourself not using the TMD so much as you are just shooting, because the TMD runs out of power too quickly and you become overwhelmed in battle. It's not intuitive like Timeshift was, where you could easily reverse, freeze, or slow time down, and easily combine that with your guns to quickly and easily dispatch enemies. In Singularity, you may hit an enemy with an age accelerator, which makes him basically age into a skeleton, but then you do that twice, and you have to switch back to your gun, which takes time to bring up... losing precious moments while you are attacked from all sides by giant ticks or what have you... Or some enemies require that you hit them with one of the functions that brings them into "phase" with your time, and you try to kill them, but by the time the phase sphere wears off, you've only hit them a couple of times with your gun, you have to do it all over again.There are boss fights, but they are pretty easy once you get the idea and pattern of their attacks and how they can be defeated.Getting into the story... Very good. The presentation is that like Bioshock, where you will find tape recordings of people leaving audio logs around, which give you an idea of how things have progressed to this point. So far, I'm liking the story, but I haven't beaten the game, so I will let you know if the ending pays off... because there is nothing I hate more than a good game ruined by a crappy ending.This is a time travel game, so I will touch on that....So far, the time travel is presented in a way that if you go back (unwillingly in most cases) and change something, when you come back to the present, you will see that things are different. I can't say any more than this without spoiling it. It's so linear that you can't time travel freely, and I will have to beat the game to analyze the time travel story plot to see if I can find any holes to speak of.There is a problem with the graphics of this game. Apparently, there are not a lot of loading screens, and the game's graphic engine streams the textures... The problem with this is that after awhile, you'll start seeing horribly low-res textures as you play to the point that you won't be able to read writing on the walls that you need to 'get' the story. So you have to close the game, and re-load, hoping they reload the textures, or you have to ignore it and push on. I think there is a user that fixed this, but it involves a hex editor. I hope that the game makers develop a patch soon, because it is distracting from the immersion.Also, there is no quick-save function. Which isn't too bad, but it would have been a nice feature.You can tell that this game was made for consoles..... Which is too bad, because a customized "PC" version (like mass effect came out with after it was released for consoles) would have catered more effectively to the PC market, but they were lazy and just did a simple console to PC port... which has resulted in the QA dept of whoever was supposed to be testing this game MISS this massive texture bug. Another issue is the non-intuitive game controls for controlling the TMD. I'm sure it's fine for consoles, and I'm lucky because I have thumb buttons on my gaming mouse, but this would be hard to work with without them... You need at least 3-5 buttons to work that thing, and the left and right mouse buttons are reserved mostly to guns, so overall, the control schemes could have been streamlined better somehow.I will update this post when I finish the game... to give final thoughts on how I think it went.

[Herbert1405241469 0]

Finished the game awhile ago. Just now getting around to posting this.Final thoughts with minimal spoilers....Overall good game, though probably not worth the $50 retail... Best to wait till the price goes down. Storytelling was done very well with a good plot, but overall brings nothing really new to the table. The aging "gimmick" didn't come through like I thought it would as it only applies to certain objects in a very linear fashion. Timeshift overall had better gameplay, and if they could have combined all of that somehow, they might have had a truly memorable game.There are 3 endings which can be reached based on a decision you make in the last 5 minutes of gameplay... No spoilers, but they are all decent enough to make the game's endings pay off. And the fact that I don't have to go through 4 hours of gameplay to achieve a different ending is nice as well. The time travel plot itself seems well rounded and gives you the opportunity to do something totally self-sacrificing (LITERALLY) or totally selfish and evil.Overall a very cinematic gaming experience, but the multiplayer is basically dead and already I traded this game on Goozex because it has little to no replay value once you're done with it. I tried online multiplayer but there was never anyone in any of the lobbies so I never really got to experience this.For old time's sake, I reinstalled Timeshift....Good gameplay, incredible graphics (for 2007) and fun AI (taking guns away from them or shooting guns out of their hands results in humorous puzzlement)But the story is somewhat lacking. I wish they would have a sequel to Timeshift, because at least they left it open. At the end of Singularity, there's basically no open ended endings which is sad because out of both of those games, Singularity should have opened up for a sequel because the story had the most potential...