Singularity

Singularity is a pretty basic "Half Life 2 With a Gimmick" game, but done better than most. The end result is a bunch of cheap setpieces haphazardly tied together by a throwaway the plot about evil scientist nonsense (but they have audio logs as if there are layers to peel back). The time manipulation gimmick is roughly comparable in depth-- or lack thereof-- to Bioshock Infinite's Elizabeth. Point at a thing, press the magic button, and that's it. There are upgrade mechanics, but it's very pointless stuff that barely affects anything ("My medkits are 10% more effective? Sweet!") and the upgrade stations are placed apart horribly. There was a huge chunk the middle where I had three weapon upgrade kits but didn't come across a weapon upgrade locker for several hours. Then later I had zero weapon upgrades but saw a locker what felt like every ten feet. Additionally, the weapon upgrade lockers are different than the character upgrade nodes, and it seems as though whenever you find one it's when you were hoping for the other. You can buy ammo at the weapon lockers although you can only carry 2 weapons. I ended up picking two weapons to focus on for the entire game, making the entire the weapon upgrade system pretty useless by the final stretch. This is even failing to mention that many of the character perks involving the energy usage of the magic glove are invalidated by a late-game upgrade that allows the glove's powers to be used for free. It's irritating, but I wasn't exactly hyped to buy that "increased oxygen meter while swimming" perk anyway.

That's about sums up my issues with the game, but it's buttressed by some decently fun action. The game maintains a somewhat 'classic FPS' feeling despite its very post-Half Life 2 railroad-style design, and includes a very satisfying shotgun reminiscent of Raven's first Soldier of Fortune game. To reiterate, the shit you do 90% of the time while you're playing this game (walk around and shoot dudes and/or monsters and/or monster dudes) is distinctly above what I'd consider average.

If you're playing on PC, however, you'll definitely want to download a program called Flawless Widescreen. Singularity was released in 2007 and the ultra-low Field of View indicates how console-to-PC ports were handled at the time. Without this fix, the view is so narrow that I found myself disoriented at best and nauseous at worst. Again, a field of view hack is mandatory for anybody considering tackling this with a keyboard and mouse.

Something I want to touch on is the ending. It does that thing a lot of games did around the time of release where it throws in a token moral choice right at the end for no reason. The good guy scientist and the bad guy scientist are standing right next to each other and the good guy says to you "There's only one thing to do! YOU'RE the anomaly! You must go back in time and kill yourself!" and the bad guy says "No! Give me the magic time glove, and I will give you unlimited power the likes of which you cannot even imagine! We will RULE the world together!"

And the whole time they're giving their speeches I'm thinking "Dog, I have a magic glove that controls time and shoots beams that blow people up. This is stupid why can't I just rule the fucking world by myself?"

So then a gun pops up and the game allows you to choose which man to shoot. So I shoot the bad guy and he died. And then the good guy says "You made the right ch--" and then I shot the good guy. And he died! And it gave me an ending where I used the magic glove to take over the world by myself! I was really impressed that that worked! A+, Singularity!

Well, okay, more like Flat B, Singularity!