Omnomasaur

Singularity

Alright, this originally started out as a reply to a forum post on Facepunch, but it grew to the length where I felt I might as well post it as a review here. Full review after the break.

I suppose I should start off by saying that Singularity is First Person Shooter developed by Raven (makers of some other games that I never played).  It’s published by Activision (well at least they aren’t Ubisoft), and it sets itself apart from other generic FPS titles by adding time manipulation as a focus point.

I absolutely loathe spoilers so in an attempt not to give anything away I will basically say nothing about the story at all, other than what I felt about it.

The story could have used a lot of improvement, but it was still far above par as far as video game stories are concerned. The (good) ending also has some more intricate plot too if you pay attention.

The game borrows heavily from Bioshock.  Since Bioshock was such an amazing game, this tends to be a good thing.  That said however, Singularity could stand to do it a little less, but at the same time a little more. I feel the audio recordings would have been better served in a format that fit with the time manipulation theme rather than the almost concerning Bioshockesque tape players.

At the same time however Singularity could have borrowed a little more from Bioshock in the abilities and upgrades department. I feel that the TMD really didn’t have nearly enough abilities as it could/should have, and other than a select few, the upgrades for it were pretty unimaginative. The weapon upgrades were a complete joke as far as creativity is concerned.

I also found that the game has a few issues with pacing as far as “level ups” are concerned. I say this because, for the first half of the game I felt underpowered and weak, like some of the enemies were just plain annoying rather than fun to fight (I’m looking at you mutant time spiders). This was to be expected as I was playing on the hardesst difficulty, however almost immediately at the halfway mark I went from dying multiple times through each section to tearing through enemies as if they weren’t even there. Where was the scaling?

Another blatant issue is that the game unreasonably short. Playing on the hardest difficulty (as I already stated) I blew through it in a lean 6 hours. 6. That’s a really short game. Now I’m sure that at some point I’ll take the time to play through it again, as those 6 short hours were quite enjoyable. However if you like to play your games once and be done with them, you’re probably better off renting this one.

Overall I’d have to say I give it 7/10. It’s fun but there are a few faults that a few more months of development polish could have worked out, a few more TMD abilities, and some blatantly needed bug fixes (texture streaming anyone?). As it stands though the game was fun while it lasted and I can’t really ask for more than that.

P.S.

One more thing that I forgot to add simply because it was so unmemorable, the “time shift” ability on objects felt kind of pointless at times. While having some very lovingly crafted and fantastic looking animations to accompany it, gameplay wise it was really nothing more than a toggle outside of combat. Usually this amounted to having to push one more button just in order to activate something. I’m not going to take points away from them for this because I will admit, this is a clever way of making pushing buttons to activate doors slightly more interesting. Just don’t make me use it on every chest before I can open it, and every tape recorder before I can listen to it.

Still 7/10. That’s all.

Tags: game, review, singularity

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 8:55 am and is filed under Other Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.