Singularity Review

When I first heard about the game Singularity and saw bit of gameplay footage, I wasn't immediately excited about playing it. It looked a bit too similar to Bioshock, which I was not a huge fan of, and I thought I would just sit this one out in anticipation of a better game. I stopped following its production and basically forgot about it for the next three months. As it got closer, though, one of my gaming buddies mentioned that he had been following it for quite some time, and was thinking about buying it. Since our taste in games is pretty similar, I started having second thoughts. He put a glimmer of hope in my shadow of a doubt, and I'm sure glad that he did, because Singularity turned out to be quite the enjoyable experience.

Set in one of my favorite gaming genres, Singularity is a Sci-Fi shooter that takes place on a remote island that is owned by the former Soviet Union, called "Katorga 12". Sometime after the events of World War II, towards the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviets discovered a powerful element called "E99" (or "E to the 99th power") that allowed them to develop weapons that were far superior to anything that the West was able make. The Soviets' efforts never came to fruition, however, and the facility is now abandoned - or at least thought to be.

You are a member of an elite special forces team from the US, one Captain Renko, deployed to the island to investigate some "strange occurrences" that have happened of late. While circling Katorga 12, your reconnaissance helicopter is hit by an EMP blast and knocked out of the sky, stranding you on the island away from the rest of your squad.


This, in case you didn't catch the bright green overlay, is Devlin. Nice guy, but not quite the brightest candle on the birthday cake.


Say... that thar's real purdy...


Oh dear God! My eyes! And my helicopter!

If you've played Bioshock, the similarities between the two games' artwork will be almost immediately apparent. Although Singularity's setting is very different, the graphics are rendered in much the same way as Bioschock's - shiny, vivid, and at times almost cartoony. That isn't to say that the graphics are bad, though. They may not be up to par with most recent shooters, but they certainly fit the story and add to the creepy, surrealistic atmosphere.



Singularity's sounds are also largely a big hit, with only a few exceptions. The ambient sounds and music do a more than adequate job of immersing you in the game, rising and falling appropriately with the action. The creature and combat sounds are excellent, whether it's the roar of a massive beast or the growl of your weapon as you pump bullets into it by the bucket-full. The voice acting is pretty decent for the most part. My only gripe here is that the Russian soldiers you encounter often repeat the same damn phrases over and over during combat, as if those were the only Russian phrases that the developers bothered to translate with Google's language tool. Aside from this minor complaint, though, Singularity sounds incredible.

Gameplay is always the most important aspect of a video game for me. Personally, I would much rather have an incredibly fun game whose graphics are not cutting edge (like Quake) than have a great-looking game that plays like crap (like Sniper: Ghost Warrior). Fortunately, Singularity offers you the best of both worlds, as the gameplay is every bit as good as the graphics. There are a small variety of situations you will find yourself in, including heated gun fights, battles against powerful creatures, and even a little puzzle-solving.



What really makes the puzzle-solving truly unique is the implementation of Singularity's semi-original gimmick, the TMD (or "Time Manipulation Device" - don't let the fact that a Russian scientist came up with an English acronym for his own invention bother you... he's quite a lovable character). The TMD not only allows you to physically manipulate certain objects, much like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, but it also gives you the power to either accelerate or reverse the aging process of some objects. A broken-down stairwell can be instantly repaired, or an explosive barrel can be reduced to a crumpled, rusty heap with a flick of the wrist. Enemies can also be manipulated by the TMD by either blowing them to pieces with an energy blast or accelerating their age until they turn to dust, which looks just about as badass as it sounds.



Tying all of these great aspects of the game together is a very compelling storyline. The overall concept is brilliantly executed (maybe it's my love for Tom Clancy Novels and East/West confrontations), the majority of the characters are developed quite well (if not an tiny bit cliched), and the pacing of the game is damn near perfect. I would highly recommend this title to anyone who enjoys a good Sci-Fi first-person shooter. Great graphics, wonderful sounds, exciting gameplay, and one hell of a story make Singularity a worthwhile title.

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Dramatic confrontation between Captain Renko and the first boss monster in the game. You know you dig the soundtrack.


Don't play with that E99 bomb - you'll go blind. And sterile.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior Review

"You had me at 'sniper'"

Ever since I saw the movie Clear and Present Danger with Harrison Ford, I've pretty much been obsessed with anything having to do with snipers. There are few things in this world more kickass than a dude dressed up as a bush blowing people's heads off from 300 yards away. I love sniper movies, and I especially love first-person shooters that feature good sniping. That said, I was practically salivating in anticipation of playing the game Sniper: Ghost Warrior.

Judging from the trailers and what the game was advertised to feature, I was sure that this was going to be an excellent title. Unfortunately, my expectations were apparently much too high, because Ghost Warrior ended up being a major disappointment for me. To be fair, it does provide you with a few very satisfying sniper moments, but for the most part the game is a convoluted train wreck. I'll briefly outline for you what I feel are the game's pros and cons.

First of all, the pros: The graphics are actually pretty nice, and can almost be compared to excellent games such as Crysis or Far Cry 2. The dense jungle environments are beautifully rendered, along with the weapon models. The biggest eyesore of the game is the character models - more specifically their faces. Game developers have made great strides in the last five or six years in the area of facial animation, but Ghost Warrior abandons any effort to follow suit, resulting in dull, lifeless faces that often remind me of dead fish (especially with the main character, who should arguably be the most animated of all). By the way: I know that I just put a "con" into the "pros" paragraph, instead of saving it for the "cons" paragraph. I'm not sorry.

The sniping and stealth mechanics are actually both the greatest pros and the greatest cons of the game. When they work, they're brilliant. The following video shows a few minutes of the first mission of the game, in which I was able to successfully use stealth to evade enemies, and (for most part) successfully snipe the hell out of the ones that weren't so lucky:



After playing this first mission, I was pumped and ready for more, thinking that this would be the norm for the remainder of the game. For some reason, though, it seems that the first mission is the only one of its kind, as each subsequent mission is marred by broken and inconsistent stealth mechanics, which make the game irritating at best, and nearly unplayable at worst. In some cases, I could sprint right through a group of hostiles at full speed, barely inches away from the enemy, and no one would even give the six-foot tall galloping shrubbery a second glance. In other situations, I would crawl at a snail's pace through thick foliage, several yards away, and be spotted almost instantly. The idea that a sniper in a full ghillie suit sitting almost perfectly still in the middle of a friggin' tropical rainforest would be easier to spot than a brightly-clad South American standing in the open and shouting obscenities in Spanish really, really pisses me off. This is the kind of crap that would make Tom Berenger cry.

Along with broken stealth mechanics, the sniping mechanics are often pretty finicky at times. One of the coolest features of the game is that you have to compensate for wind speed and distance in your aiming, so the center of the crosshairs isn't always where your bullet will land. In the easier modes (I chose to play through on the "Medium" setting first), you see a red dot that represents the actual point that your bullet will strike. Placing this red dot on a target's head will most likely result in a pretty wicked-sick cutscene, in which you get to watch your bullet travel through the air in slow motion and nail the bad guy in the brain basket. Sometimes, however, no matter how well you line up the shot, the bullet just doesn't hit the target, or else it does something lame like this:



Probably the worst mistake the developers of Ghost Warrior make is to periodically attempt to create scenes similar to those found in the far superior Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games. I'm sure that their intent was to provide a change of pace from sneaking through foliage and sniping by dumping you into an intense combat situation, but it's so horribly done that I could barely force myself to play through it. The only endearing qualities of the game are the rare moments in which you can pull off beautiful headshots and remain undetected, watching your foes spiral around and run aimlessly in panic and confusion. They should have stuck to that type of gameplay, even if it was only marginally better.

I'll admit that I haven't played the multiplayer mode of Sniper: Ghost Warrior yet, but I really don't imagine that it would redeem the game enough to make it worth buying at full price. My advice is: if you're a sniper fanatic like myself, wait until this game inevitably drops in price to buy it. There are plenty of games out there (many are years older than this one) that feature sniping and handle it much, much better than Ghost Warrior. If you have any appreciation for contemporary computer games whatsoever, you will be sorely disappointed in this half-assed attempt at a sniper game. If I were to give this game a grade, the best it could possibly achieve is a C, and that's being quite generous.

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