Singularity Review

I finished Singularity last night and it's the best SP FPS campaign I've played since Bioshock. A neat trailer for you here.

The game was developed by the underappreciated "Raven Software". The guys that do a lot of work for id games with Quake and if my memory serves me right they ported Doom 3 (too lazy to fact check). Bottom line is they make a fine shooter with tight controls.

The game takes place between 1955 during the Cold War and 2010. You're a trooper sent to a mysterious island where there's been large energy readings and when you get there a bunch of crazy cool time stuff happens and to make a long interwoven story very short....you save a very bad Russian man in 1955 and he pretty much rules the world in 2010. The rest of the game is spent trying to right what you screwed up. The "butterfly effect" if you will.

Likes:

Controls were very tight and the gunplay is immensely satisfying.

Time Manipulation Device (TMD) - You'll eventually get the TMD and with if you solve a lot of puzzles and use it in combat to totally screw over the bad guys.

Time travel and pulses. Switching between 1955 and 2010 and seeing your actions affect the game world in such drastic ways is a friggin blast and is very well done. Shockingly well done at times. I found myself marveling at the details over and over again.

The story was a lot of fun to watch play out and while it wasn't anything too ground breaking it was refreshing to actually play a game where I cared about what was going on instead of going through the motions.

Puzzles are pretty easy, but nothing too complex.

Using the TMD in imaginative ways. One of my favorite ways to dispatch enemies was to basically make a "slowing time ball" (my term) and shoot it at a group of guys. Anyone caught in it moved slow and their bullets were slowed. What you do is you unload a ton of bullets into the ball and then use the TMD to get rid of the balls. When you dissolve the ball the enemies are hit with a hail of gunfire. Not super needed or necessary, but a lot of fun. Using the time ball as a sort of shield to dodge bullets was neat, too. You can def use your imagination in this game.

Perfect length for the game. Not too long and thankfully, unlike most big shooters nowadays cough CoD cough HALO cough not too short.

3 different endings and 1 of which is a mind screw!

Dislikes:

Unreal Engine 3. When the shit will developers stop using this damn thing. I hate it!

The game borrows, stylistically, from Bioshock pretty heavily at times, but they do it justice IMHO.

Puzzles can get repetative.

Really there wasn't a lot I didn't enjoy about the game. Even the boss fights were pretty cool...esp for an FPS.

All in all it's a great game that will most def get passed over by just about everyone because Activision didn't promote it at all.

It's a great game that plays like a great mix of Bioshock, Half Life 2 and even Dead Space.

I know most of you guys don't play many SP shooters, but you should def give this gem a chance because there probably won't ever be a sequel.