Singularity

Raven Software is allowing gamers to rack up a sizable body count.  After the run and gun strafing Wolfenstein, Raven Software has decided to tackle a new breed of endless grunts on the receiving end of a variety of clever weapons: Soviet Russians.  Add in time travel, and how does Singularity fare?  Let’s find out.

Developer: Raven Software

Publisher:

Genre:

The verdict: This ho-hum shooter may be entertaining but it has no ambition or uniqueness of its own and feels unpolished.

Singularity comes to us from Raven Software, the folks who gave us Wolfenstein back in 2009.  Both games emphasize old school run and gun combat, but while Wolfenstein had no assumption of being anything other than a B-action level experience, Singularity goes the extra mile and tries to incorporate a complex, dark story.  Unfortunately, while Singularity is a fun old school shooter the story falls flat and the gameplay is unrefined.

Back to the…erm, past

The story of Singularity deals with a dark secret of Soviet Russia.  What is the deal with modern war games and Russia lately, anyway?  It’s as if developers finally realized Nazi Germany is a tad overused.  At least we had an actual war with them, rather than contriving excuses for Russia to gear up for battle.  Anyway, secret project du jour deals with Element 99, or E-99, which Soviet Russia researched as a power source and time manipulator.  As Captain Nate Renko, an EMP disables your helicopter as it tries to investigate the island of Katorga-12, where the research was taking place.  When Renko changes the past without realizing it things go horribly wrong, and now Renko and his few allies on the island must work to restore time and prevent history from being altered permanently.

Time travel stories walk a fine line in terms of continuity, but Singularity falls off it altogether and the story winds up with more plot holes than Timecop.  If the past was altered so that the Soviets are in power, why is Katorga-12 completely unchanged?  For that matter, why are events relatively unchanged including your American friend, Devlin, still focusing on the mission before time was changed?  The story is at least coherent in terms of jumps back and forth between the present and 1950, but the final plot twist is so insultingly obvious you’ll wonder why the writers bothered.

What’s our tone?

Gameplay in Singularity mirrors BioShock and to a lesser extent Dead Space, but incorporates run and gun strafing with a lot of abilities to dismantle, vaporize, and blast away Russians.  Early on, the game is actually kind of schizophrenic.  Being armed with a low powered pistol and fighting against enemies that jump out you suggests the game is going for a survival horror theme which it actually pulls off reasonably well.  Then you get a temporary NPC partner, a high powered machine gun, and an absurdly overpowered shotgun, and the game ceases to be scary even before you get the TMD.

There’s a difficulty problem all around.  I was playing on hard difficulty and got killed a few times early on, but once you get the machinegun and shotgun you get progressively more overpowered weapons and the game loses all change save for some enemies with very cheap attacks.  The frugal RPG elements are a nice touch, keeping things streamlined but giving players the option to improve their capabilities ala BioShock, but there’s no need for them.  While fights in BioShock could be harrowing, the RPG upgrades in Singularity just stack the game even further in your favor until you have enough power to single-handedly take on the entire Russian army.

Time is definitely on your side

Let’s be fair.  I keep getting the impression that Singularity is meant to be a Painkiller-type first person shooter where the objective is not meaningful story or compelling atmosphere, but simply a ton of creative ways to kill your hapless victims.  As a shooting gallery Singularity never fails to entertain.  The Time Manipulation Device has a variety of powers that surprisingly go far beyond the usual time slowing mechanic.  There’s a classic shockwave that damages enemies, the ability to instantly age enemies into skeletons, a time bubble that slows down everything inside it, and many more.

Time manipulation is often applied to weapons as well, such as a rifle that lets you manually guide exploding bullets into enemies’ waiting skulls.  The sniper rifle does feature a time slowing mechanic, but a sniper rifle is a weapon where it actually feels appropriate.  Even if it’s easy, core combat is a lot of fun, and it’s used to good effect in some spectacular boss fights during the middle of the game.  It’s nice to see monsters that actually react to our weapons rather than a single weak point that we have to wait ten minutes for a shot at, and the return of a health meter is a gratifying one.

The problem with the TMD is that set pieces quickly start repeating themselves.  The TMD will often have you reverse age a worn out staircase into working order so you can proceed; it’s cool the first few times, but when you do it fifty or sixty times it loses the charm.  There are a few clever puzzles that involve aging and reversing objects, but they’re easy to figure out.  This was also an area of missed potential, especially since the TMD just isn’t utilized as well as it could be.  You can age and revert staircases, revert aged armor cases so you can loot their contents, but this all seems very by-the-numbers.  If the entire island was exposed to E-99 after the explosion, why am I only allowed to manipulate very specific set pieces?  There were a lot of opportunities that could have been exploited.

Misdirection in the time stream?

Singularity still can’t seem to grasp what makes the game fun.  Mowing down endless legions of slavering grunts can work as a game formula, but the game constantly keeps using audio logs and dramatic sequences to keep us immersed in the completely static story.  The lack of difficulty might not be such a big deal if the game didn’t try so hard to be more than an old school shooter.  The game just has no identity of its own; it takes the audio logs from BioShock, horror music and monsters that play dead from Dead Space, and an identical physics gun to Half-Life 2.  It’s like if you stole parts from a dozen different cars and then tried piecing them together with superglue.

One thing Singularity actually does better than BioShock is the ending; not the quality, but the method of delivery.  Rather than the tired “Shining hero of light versus dark embodiment of Lucifer” ending, there are three endings and none of them are actually that good.  I would have liked to see endings be kept a little more ambiguous rather than three versions of “You’re screwed”, it’s more important to see developers finally evolving beyond the “good ending bad ending” routine.

Conclusion

Singularity tries to juggle multiple elements from several popular shooters and winds up dropping most of them.  Core combat is still fun and the TMD, if gimmicky, has amusing applications in combat.  Overall, Singularity doesn’t wind up being that good, but it’s not bad, either.  It’s really difficult to recommend it unless you need a shooter fix.  It’s fun, but there’s nothing that stands out about it.  If you need a shooter fix give it a try, but don’t expect BioShock.
 
Disclaimer: This review is reposted from my blog at  http://redmage.gamerlimit.com/