Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher
Game: Singularity
Platform: XBOX 360
Played For: 4 hrs
Singularity by Raven Software is a nicely retro first person shooter with sci-fi and horror elements. It also dollops out a whole lot of Cold War Russia in a timely fashion, as Russian spies in Cambridge and 1980s nostalgia have had people reminiscing about the Iron Curtain. Running on the old battleaxe that is the Unreal Engine, Singularity is not at the cutting edge of technology today. But slightly outdated graphics and issues with balance should not dissuade you to give this title a try. There is definite fun to be had, and the several hours it takes to complete the single player campaign will have you remembering well the old adage: tempus fugit.
In Singularity you play an American soldier sent to investigate the mysterious Russian research facility on the island of Katorga-12. It turns out that a new element of nature, e99, was discovered here in the 1950s, leading to experimentation with the fabric of time. The game kind of glosses over the fact that a 99th element already exists on the periodic table, Einsteinium, a man-made radioactive goo that has no known use whatsoever, and has not led to any advances in time travel, alas. Anyway, over the last fifty years in the Singularity world the Russians secretly perfected a TMD or Time Manipulation Device. Just as you arrive on Katorga-12 a temporal cataclysm occurs, and history is thrown out of whack. After a crash landing on the island and some time spiraling of your own, you soon have the TMD strapped to your wrist and mutant Russian zombies to fend off left and right… because we all know that mad science of any type must naturally lead to zombies (time travel, inorganic chemistry, forestry… you name it.)
The ensuing adventure has you hopping back and forth between the 1950s and modern day, trying to fix the temporal disaster that threatens to collapse time down into a singularity. At least, that’s what I think you were doing, but maybe it was more about rewriting history to meet your ends. Or perhaps the whole goal was just to get from one side of the island to the other, as your immediate imperative tends to be “get to ____” or “quick! This passage will lead you to ______” (the NPCs are quite insistent on these points.) Right at the beginning of the game you see a model of the whole crescent-shaped island, and a quick glance shows that the whole game is an obstacle course leading to the northern tip. Strange that your travel is so linear in a game where time is growing non-linear.
Along the way you’ll collect e99 tech, which is spent like money to afford upgrades both to your person and to your TMD device. It isn’t clear why e99 should be able to increase the distance you can sprint or hold your breath underwater… maybe it allows you to tweak your personal timeline to include more Wii fitness in your character’s past? Other upgrades include reducing the damage from melee or ranged attacks, doubling found e99 deposits (get this one early, and make sure to equip it!) or extending the duration of notable TMD powers. You can also find weapon upgrades that allow you to power up your guns, but these are rare and should be spent with care.
The TMD is quite a powerful little item. It allows you to age or de-age various objects, people or monsters that you encounter. In order for the game to be at all reasonable, there is a conceit that the TMD only works on things previously irradiated with e99… i.e. it will only effect that which the designers want you to mess around with. This is an understandable limitation, as the concept of rotting walls away or repairing objects at will or even endlessly rewinding difficult situations would be cool, but would also render the game extremely hard to implement in any sensible fashion. Still, you can’t help but feel that your powers are a little arbitrary when the only objects they affect are for specific puzzles, or fighting monsters. There is a lot more room where the developers could have played with this idea… turning rotten food into fresh food, slowing down explosions or even raising the dead to ask them directions, for example.
Other functions of the TMD include the creation of slow time spheres that act great as shields, impulse bursts that cause people to explode (not sure how that fit into the whole time theme, but it was fun so whatever) and carrying objects just like the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. Aging mutant monsters has varied effect depending on the type of enemy you’ve encountered. Some explode, others are just put into a temporary stasis, and some are not affected. You can also mutate soldiers into monsters, the science of which remains unclear.
As a science fiction story Singularity is singularly awful. While there is quite a bit of exposition in audio logs and notes you find along the way, very little thought is put into the implications of multiple alternate time streams, paradox, interesting science mumbo-jumbo or philosophy. I liked a lot of the alternate ecology that springs up in the wake of the e99 experiment gone wrong, but there could have been a lot more done with the connection between alternate universes and alien flora and fauna showing up. The Cold War setting also provides little more than an excuse for occasional monolithic architecture (giant Lenin statues and such) and for the enemy soldiers to cry out in Russian rather than English… I guess that means we don’t have to feel bad we’re shooting them? First person shooters are not known for their humanitarian aspects, but it would be nice if there was a way to deal with ordinary people without blowing their brains out. Mutants are always fair game, however.
There are three possible endings to the game, all of which hinge on a final decision in the last minute of play, and have no connection to anything that has gone before. While this also could have been improved, the designers are at least graceful enough to allow you to replay those said last minutes, so you can see all three alternatives without playing the whole thing through again or consulting YouTube. This is only appropriate… you do have a time manipulation device after all!
The game is rounded out with a robust multiplayer mode that of course I had nothing to do with. I’m told you can play as the various types of monsters, run around and death match and do all the usual stuff that’s been happening ever since Quake… or Doom… or whenever this arena battling began. You’ll have to look to another review to get into the nitty-gritty of this aspect of the game.
Despite the rough edges Singularity was a lot of fun to play, and the action and environments kept me visually interested through to the conclusion. If you are like me, you can never get tired of being dropped into a rapidly deteriorating, all-hell’s-breaking-loose cataclysm situation, and fighting your way through mystery and horror to make things right again… or just survive. The best level of the game, a sunken tanker ship you’ve repaired that is rapidly deteriorating again as you explore it, makes the game worth a play by itself. Singularity will remind you why you enjoyed classic FPS games of the past, while at the very least capturing your imagination with ideas for what could be done in a game in the future. Time will tell.
