Singularity

Bioshock (and System Shock 2 before it) was critically acclaimed for many reasons, chief among them being the incredible story it told, and the way it told it. In an effort to avoid tired expository cut-scenes after every half-hour of play, it instead opted to have the story unfold naturally around you. Abandoned, rusty environments told tales of Rapture’s ultimate fate and the numerous audio logs brought to life the human struggles and deceptions that led to it. It was nothing short of breathtaking.

It’s both a blessing and curse for Singularity then, that within minutes of landing on Katorga-12 (aka creepy abandoned Soviet base #139202) you find yourself being led through a series of almost too carefully designed locales, clicking on the audio logs strewn about the place. Bioshock’s success has left us acutely aware of these storytelling techniques and it only serves to make it tough to initially immerse in Raven Software’s creation.

Fortunately this feeling doesn’t last long, you’ll suddenly find yourself wrenched into the past and into the final hours of Katorga-12’s operational life. Burning rafters collapsing around your head and floors falling out from underneath your feet, you’ll quickly find yourself tasked with dragging an anonymous scientist away from his death over a burning pit. It feels natural and urgent despite the fact that you’ve been tossed into the situation with so little context. In this, Singularity breaks from Bioshock’s framework and perhaps even surpasses it.

The pattern doesn’t stop there. The gameplay mainly concerns itself with a familiar juggling act between supernatural powers and gunplay. Again, there’s a crucial difference, Singularity’s powers come as the result of a device known as the TMD (Time Manipulation Device). This opens up a set of abilities that I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen in a game before. For starters, you can age and revert myriad objects and pieces of the environment. A busted, decrepit set of stairs hindering your progress? Simply tap the left bumper while looking in their direction and revert them back to a climbable state. Desperately in need of health but the only medicine chest nearby is a beaten wreck? Simply point the... well, you get the idea.

This excellent concept also bleeds into the combat, you can age soldiers to the point that they crumble into dust or revert them into crazed monsters that will attack other enemies for you (yeah, that last part doesn’t make a whole lot of sense). Tap the TMD button again after reverting a soldier and you can force them into an inflammatory bomb state, then you can sit back and watch them rather usefully kamikaze into a bothersome group of hostiles. On top of this there’s a couple more functions mapped to the right stick, a single click will allow you to pick up moveable objects and ping them about with ease, a la Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, or hold it in and you’ll charge up a ball of slow-mo energy which you can then fire onto any surface to create a dome of manipulated time, handy for slowing down agile monsters.

It’s all great fun, reminiscent of the pure joy in carnage that FPS games more commonly aimed for a decade ago. So often in games like this it’s easy to let all your powers fall by the wayside for the more effective physical weapons but you’ll find yourself constantly compelled to play around and find every way to dispatch an enemy possible. That’s not to say that the weapons aren’t fun too though. You’re given a fairly typical FPS armory to play with, a pistol, assault rifle, shotgun, missile launcher, etc but every weapon has that telling heft and feels satisfying, you’ll have as much fun blowing off a mutant’s head with the shotgun as you will lobbing crates at them. There’s some inspiration here though too, the standout weapon being the Dethex Launcher, essentially a normal grenade launcher in its primary mode but hold down the fire button and it allows you to drop a guidable grenade to the floor which you can then roll through small gaps to cause destruction from afar.

The only area in which I would say it doesn’t quite match up to Bioshock is the visuals. It doesn’t have a trademark style to hook everything into and it just never really does anything particularly interesting with the environments. It’s all fine, it’s detailed and pretty enough but we’ve all seen more than our share of rundown military/industrial areas, it ends up feeling rather by-the-numbers. In the few sections where you find yourself propelled into the past, it’s exciting to see the ruined areas previously explored rendered as they were, it’s handled rather well. Everything is shiny and functional, it gives you a sense of significant loss when you’re thrown back into the present.

It’s a struggle to find anything seriously negative to say about Singularity, it’s such an assured, inspired and interesting experience. Perhaps, at a stretch, the story could be criticised, for the genre it’s a tad too simplistic and it’s over far too quickly. My playthrough clocked in at around 8 hours, that’s including a fair amount of snooping around in nooks and crannies looking for secrets. As it ended, I couldn’t help but feel that they hadn’t fully explored all the great ideas they’ve come up with, that it could really have gone on for another 4-5 hours without coming close to stagnation. Perhaps unexpectedly though, it does come to a pretty satisfying conclusion and there’s three distinctive endings to get, easily accessible by a final autosave moments before the finale.

Recommendation comes easily for Singularity then. It falls just on the right side of derivative while adding plenty of its own ideas. It’s a shame it won’t be played by many, as under-the-radar as it flew, but those who do play it will get to enjoy one of the best single player experiences of this generation.