Singularity has a winning recipe and a few good tricks up its sleeves, but its various graphical oddities bring it down.
Bad : Unreal Engine 3 at it's worse with texture pop-in that...never pops-in. Cheesy dialogue and forgettable locals for the most part. Not a very long experience too.
Singularity is finally out on shelves. Back in the days, when it was announced. I remember being all excited about it. It was aimed to be the mix between Red Alert's cheesy Soviet Union and Bioshock. The result is about that, more or less.
Without spoiling anything, Singularity will pit you in some hidden Soviet experimental lab where everything goes wrong. At the beginning of the game, you'll experience some very nice set pieces ( à la Bioshock ) that is so different from the rest of the game that it could have belonged to an entirely other game.
The gameplay itself is pretty good. It's reminiscent of every shooters made by Raven ; which means a lot of gore and cool weaponry. Singularity introduces the TMD device, or simply a '' left hand of magic like Bioshock and every other games that use physics''. You'll be able to move things around and throw them, and to ''age'' crates for simple but fun puzzles. The TMD can also be used in combat for some cool auto-kills and other illogical effects. For instance, aging a phase tick ( an irritating critter ) will make it switch its allegiance and attack its siblings while getting bigger until it explodes. Huh, okay. I mean, why not.
You can upgrade stuff like in Bioshock, but in a seriously dumbed-down way. You'll have only a handful of upgrades to buy, and even if you do have the choice of which to get, most players will grab the most obvious ones.
Like every other Raven games except Wolverine, the game is quite straightforward and has a steady framerate and very little bugs to be experienced.
And then, why have I slapped the review with a 7.5? Because of its very uneven graphical quality. At times, the game looks great. At other times, and more often than it really should, the game looks quite bad.
Raven proves once again that they have no mastery upon the Unreal Engine 3. Just like their Wolverine game, Singularity suffers from heavy texture pop-in, and it's probably the worse case ever seen in the history of this engine. That award was previously held by Rise of the Argonauts, but it has now been granted to Singularity.
It's so bad it'll make your eyes bleed. In some cutscenes, the texture pop-in can take about fifteen second to load, and on numerous occasion, during the normal gameplay, you will encounter textures that simply refuses to show. The word '' bland '' has never been put to such a good use before this game.
See, you'll be introduced to awesome, eerie decors with a lot of interactivity that really makes a cool atmosphere. Unfortunately, the game quickly steps away from its winning roots and jumps into the by-the-book levels that includes long, boring corridors while you're being harassed by some Russian dude whose voice is the seriously stereotyped... russian dude.
So say goodbye to the awesome eerie atmosphere, and say hello to the crowded environments, filled with soldiers and mutant, while your radio won't stop buzzing of forgettable dialogue that you really shouldn't keep attention to.
There are also notes and audio logs scattered around, in the likes of Bioshock and Dead Space, but unlike these, the ones found in Singularity are boring to read and listen to. Especially the audio logs that forces you to stay in one place. Also, what makes them boring is the fact since the game uses the stereotyped russian accent, everybody sounds alike, so there's no way at all to discern who is talking in the audio logs.
Remember the cool side-stories you could follow in Bio and Dead Space that would lead you to understand the gruesome fates of some of the crew members? Well, it won't happen here. Honestly, all the side-story elements are very avoidable, and you should do so.
Make no mistake, Singularity is not a triple-A shooter in the likes of Resistance, Half-Life and Bioshock. It's comparable to games like Wolfenstein, Turok and so on. It's a good old class B shooter that'll be 19,99 within the next five or six months. Is it worth its full price tag? Hell no. It's short, at times unpolished and quite ordinary. But is it fun? Hell yes! Give it a rent, or buy it cheap.