Set fire and THEN age your enemies to death (but not before slowing down time to a crawl)?? Only in Singularity.
Singularity is one of those rare games that just has enough to keep me playing all the way from start to finish. I have lots of games. LOTS. And I tend to jump around from game to game…a short section on Fallout today a quick go on Blur tomorrow and then something totally different the day after. But this is different.
The last time a game that managed to hold my attention like this, so much so that I completed it in one single night I might add, was Metal Gear Solid 2. The game before that was SimCity 2000. And now this.
By no means is this a flawless game. But it tries to take the best elements out of established chart toppers and succeeds quite well. Right off the bat the game sets a heavy atmosphere and is amazingly creepy a la F.E.A.R.. Dead bodies, hints of horrific creatures, creepy flashbacks/time anomalies all help to keep you paranoid with that Silent Hill feeling. The graphics are immediately recognisable as Wolfenstein-like. The engine (based on Unreal?) is able to output good but not exceptional graphics, but at the same time with a lot of amazing special graphical effects happening in real game time. It’s a little unfortunate that the said atmosphere gets lost and forgotten after the first hour or so. Along the way and amidst portal hopping as you would in Valve’s Portal… to make things very interesting, you gain a Bioshock-esque Time Manipulation Device and then later on a most worthy upgrade: the Deadlock.
Valve’s highly acclaimed Portal
Hey is that Gordon on the other side there? o wait…
Maybe the game designers looked at Max Payne and thought hmm bullet time..but cliched. Or maybe they looked at did with F.E.A.R. and thought bullet time in a FPS now thats a change, but it’s been done. Maybe just like they looked at Half Life and went ahh the gravity gun and then came up with the TMD Gravity upgrade or Alyx Vance and then came up with Kathryn… With Deadlock however, Raven Software really really hit the sweet spot in terms of slowing down time. Throw an energy-like ball and you get a localised sphere of time slowdown as it hits its target and expands. Enemies caught in it are powerless and are left to your cruel device; those not caught in it would still have a difficult time hitting you with bullets as they pass through the sphere at a pedestrian rate and some just walk into it and get stuck oblivious to what it is. These are the best moments in the game and you’re free to recreate them as you please. For me this never got old and the single player campaign was short enough for me to finish but at the same time left me wanting more.
He’s stuck there for the next 10 seconds. What will you do?
Pest control of the future gets a little too drastic.
Metacritic’s aggregate score for it is 77. I’d give it an 8 at least. if you like the idea of slowing down time and generally torturing your enemies and then seeing what happens when normal time resumes, get this game.
And if you want to try the following, get this too.
O don’t look so bored love! Let’s see now if I adjust the gravity gun enough for just the clothing…
