Brain Junkfood: What's Wrong With This? 3: Singularity

Let me just put this out there from the start: Time travel plots are usually stupid, cliche, and laughable. Sure, you have The Terminator, which was awesome... then you think, If the T-800 is sent to kill Sarah Conner, shouldn't that be an indicator that he failed? Okay, so something could be said about the fact that he's not human, but if he could calculate the fucking trajectory of a speeding semi with a tank of liquid nitrogen, he should be able to do the math: Sarah Conner + having to go back in time to kill her in the future = failure. What's more is this: because the T-800 went back in time, she got pregnant. That may not have happened if the T-800 didn't go back in time.

...Wow. Now that I completely just ruined The Terminator for myself, I'm extra pissed that I have to talk about Singularity. What? You say it's a good game? Fuck you. This is about as good as a game as 300 was historically accurate. For starters, the game is a First Person Shooter about fighting Russians during the cold war, but takes place in modern times with monsters, and with portal/time travel elements. It's as if someone at Raven software said, "Wolfenstein was a flop, but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare wasn't. Let's take that, Portal, and the Terminator, and make that into a game. Hmm... needs more enemies. Let's throw in this obscure You Are Empty game that no one has heard of in their as well." There's three issues with that logic. First, You Are Empty flopped like a tuna in a net. Second, no one played it outside of me and Russians. Third, You Are Empty had something going for it: Giant Carnivorous Chickens!

Raven didn't steal everything, though, I'll give them that. In Singularity, the game is all about time manipulation. You can age things backwards and forwards, as well as time travel. This is actually a pretty interesting gimmick... buuut they used it in all of the wrong ways. You age boxes to get ammo, make platforms to jump on, or to stop spinning fans after slowing them down. This begs the question: If I can slow the fan down, why couldn't I just have stopped the fucking thing? It'd be a bit easier than pushing a rusted box in the blades. You can also age the bad guys, which makes the humans turn to ash, and the Smurf Zombies ("Zeks") explode.

Yeah, let's talk about designing bad guys here, real quick. Your main enemy is buff blue zombies. They're supposed to be mutates from the element (E99) on the island creating a time fluctuation that sends you to the past periodically, but makes everyone else into giant Smurfs. Some of them have heads coming out of their heads, too. The only way I know this is because I had to look it up. You see a two headed zombie, doing think, "Great Scott, Marty! You screwed up the Time Stream!" or do you think, "That's a freaky Siamese Twin monster!" Seriously, the design makes no sense, as there is no hint that the time stream is splitting, only changing. There's also the fact that some of the other enemies are only "slightly" changed. Exploding ticks that only look different because they glow? Doom 3 out did that!

Balance in the game is a little weird, too. Humans go down in a good amount of hits. Ticks, are usually too fast to hit if you don't try to slow them down, and can kill you in one hit. Zeks, the melee guys, are fast, strong, and take a full magazine of assault rifle bullets, or ten shotgun shells to kill. They're the guys you fight first. The enemies seriously get easier as you go on. That's like playing a warped edition of Street Fighter 4 where you fight Seth first, and end the game fighting Ghandi. But, just because the enemies get easier, doesn't mean the game does. No, they decide that swarming you from every direction at once isn't the only douchebag strategy. No, randomly not being affected by your powers though...

Yeah, on more than one occasion, I was told to slow a monster down. I hit him with the BALL OF SLOWNESS dead center. He moves normally. Make up your mind you schizophrenic shit monkey of a game.

But, that's not the part that breaks my brain. Far from it, in fact. The part that breaks my brain is the continuity. In the beginning of the game, you go back in time and save a scientist from falling into a pit of fire. That changes the entire future to him becoming an evil mastermind. You then go back in time again, to a few hours before you went back to save him, and shoot him in the face, sending him flying out the window. So, I shot him in the head, killing him before I had a chance to go back and save him from falling into a flaming death. Mission over, right?

No. Because I saved him from his burning hell on earth, even after I killed him before I could do that, he's still alive. Yes, they seriously either bent the rules of time, or forgot their own story. I even looked this up on their wikia page, and people never pointed this out. The fire you save him from in the beginning of the game is the same one he sets if you don't kill him in the middle. How can he set the fire if he's all ready dead!?

There's only one way to finish this review, and that's by talking about Kathryn. Look at this picture. Do you know what she's looking at? Apparently, she's looking at you. Yes, people in the future are walleyed. That, or the model designer took a flying leap in the middle of working on this game.

Talking about bad games is making my head hurt. But, next time, we have more than a bad game. We have a disappointment. A really, really big disappointment. Goichi, look at you. You've changed considerably. To a dumbass, if I may!