Singularity

Singularity is, at its core, an old school shooter; but it’s also more than that. There’s an aura of survival horror around this game almost from beginning to end, and then there’s also the presence of some modern puzzle game components. These riddles are actually quite basic and very easy to get around, but they do serve a purpose, which is, in my opinion, to slow down the action rhythm and to make the player more aware of the surroundings and more involved in the story. After all, this is a game that revolves almost completely around the concept of disrupting the time-space continuum and its respective consequences, and even if it definitely doesn’t break any new ground in the ever so populated science-fiction field, it rarely ever stops being at least interesting — and thus, the existence of the Time Manipulation Device (the name given to the glove the main character wears) is more than a mere excuse to have some puzzles spread out across the levels; it would be more accurate to say that the puzzles exist to make the player conscious of the glove’s capabilities and its power to eventually change history.

However, you really can’t change all that much in the game’s narrative and that is actually the story’s weakest point: the developers succeed in gradually showing the player just how powerful they can become by wielding the TMD (Time Manipulation Device), but you soon realize that no matter what you do you will probably always end up in the same spot by the end of the game. This predictability — or inability to do better, if you will — behind the narrative can be a little disappointing if you were looking for a more open ended game, but then again, you have to keep in mind that this is still “just” a shooter at heart. You do have 3 different endings, but the one you get depends solely on the one decision you get to make during the whole game.

The graphics engine is competent at creating an atmosphere, but we’ve all seen the Unreal Engine perform a lot better than this. It’s still a nice looking game, though.

The arsenal at your disposal is not a huge one, but you can only carry two weapons at a time so I guess it wouldn’t make sense to come up with a million guns and then only use a couple of them. Instead, you get about 10 neat guns to play with through the course of the game; and let me tell you, they all feel great and a couple of them are really quite ingenious and fun to shoot with — and there’s never any shortage of ammo to do so.

Both the weapons and your TMD can be upgraded as long as you have enough “E99 tech” (which is the fictional matter behind the technology used into manufacturing the TMD glove). This E99 can be easily found pretty much everywhere, and as long as you look thoroughly enough, you’ll have plenty to become more and more powerful as the story develops. Actually, you can become so powerful that everything and everyone that the game throws at you can be almost effortlessly disposed of, even in the hardest difficulty setting.

This brings me to my conclusion, which is that while being very worthy of being played, this entertaining game ends way too quickly, and since the 3 different endings can be achieved without having to play the whole game from the beginning, it doesn’t leave Singularity with much of a replayability value.

However, there is undeniable great fun to be had while Singularity’s short single-player campaign lasts!