That was short, ungratifying, and almost painful.
I’m not going to bother with the story because they give you so little of the story at present with nothing more than a 45 second blurt of exposition at the end of the episode that it isn’t really worth pointing out. Picture your typical BS FPS plot (or crappy Ah-nold action film plot)
Sin Episodes: Emergence makes use of Valve’s gorgeous and sophisticated “Source” engine. This game definitely has the good looks it needs to make it. They make excellent use of the effects and the use of light and shadow is admirable. The sound is another high point in the game’s flashy aesthetics. The VO’s are strong, fitting, and they may not make you say “Oscar” but they aren’t wooded, flat, or painful to sit through. I scored the aesthetics well but not too well because this is just another HL2 look-alike in appearance. This is where praise from me is going to end for the most part.
The game starts out with a nice cut-scene with a pretty decent view (play it and you’ll see what I mean) and the story they seem to be setting up certainly seems intriguing enough.
However, after only a couple of minutes of playing the game crashed out on me. My drivers are all up to date so I know that wasn’t the issue. Also, while playing I found myself getting stuck on various pieces of debris such as pieces of smashed crates or other broken objects. I also hit more than my fair share of invisible walls in the game with crates and other large objects which didn’t look like they were blocking my path but the collision detection said otherwise. These glitches combined to add roughly an hour or so to my play time simply because I was either stuck on something and open prey for enemies or I was forced into a long fall by some glitchy collision detection.
This issue also seemed to ring true with the enemies who attacked with melee combat techniques. I clearly seemed to physically be out of range of the attack but would suddenly find myself taking damage. This is very frustrating. And this is only made worse by the enemies’ less than underwhelming AI. They seem to abide by one simple doctrine: “When in doubt stand there like an idiot and shoot”. This means that if you storm a room full of enemies they start out strong and some initially fall back to cover while shooting but for the most part they will just stand there, pelting you with unbelievable accuracy while your health whittles away. They also have the uncanny ability to hit you when you can’t see them. I was in many a scenario taking damage from enemies with whom I had no clear line of sight and was therefore unable to respond in kind.
This brings me to my next gripe: The health system. Enemies seem to hit you once or twice and you go from 100% health (or more if you found any of the "secrets") to 35% from a couple of bullets in the leg. Meanwhile you stand point blank and nail them in the face with the shotgun (one of only 3 weapons made available to you in the less than 7 hours of gameplay) and he’s fine and dandy still plugging away at you with an almost hideously over-powered pistol. Then the next guy comes along and you dispatch him with one off center shot to the body. They didn’t seem to work for too long on this aspect of the game. It is very inconsistent and more than a little frustrating. This was, needless to say, another let-down in a game that seemed to be riddled with them. It's almost like the game under-went no play testing.
But don’t despair! The game is seriously less than 7 hours of gameplay straight through. This is due in part to the fact that it’s part 1 of a series but I still think that for the hype, the BS, and the anticipation they could have invested a couple of more hours into it just to keep us around.
Following your succesful completion of the game your only reward is a preview of the next game. The plot, once again, looks pretty decent but so little of it is revealed to you that it's almost not tempting enough. I don't think I'm going to DL the next episode.
This is one of the shortest reviews I have ever written for one of the shortest games I’ve ever played and I have to say that this game deserves nothing but a word of warning: “Don’t waste your ef’ing time unless you just want to kill a few hours before an appointment or something”. And seriously, $20 was still over-charging...and I even got the pre-order/pre-load bonus that knocked it down to $18 and still felt gypped. Painful. I’d say they should have provided us with a free demo but with the game being this short it felt like a demo.