Path of Neo is a fun beat'em coupled up with some poor developmental choices that bring it down from being great
The game revolves around the main character in the movies, the "Chosen One" Neo, who is the savior of mankind in the real and virtual world. As you begin the game you play as the hacker Mr. Anderson (Neo) who receives a phone call from a stranger telling him to follow his directions if he wants to learn more about the Matrix, at this point you're introduced to a very archaic stealth sequence where you avoid Agents and Police officers, during this time you also notice one of the game's bugs, enemies teleporting right in front of you and behind you. Although this doesn't derail you from accomplishing your objectives it does cause frustration as you waste so much time jamming on the triangle button trying to wrestle out of the police officers grip. At the end of this mission you are caught by the Agents and are implanted with a tracking insect and then saved by Morpheus and the gang, during one of the haphazardly strewn cut scenes. The cut scenes usually last no longer then a minute but they try to jam several story plot elements together so quickly, that it causes the whole story to be incoherent. Sometimes you are thrown into levels without any sense of direction and are told to save this person , without any knowledge concerning why you're doing this , this game assumes you know this if you've been following the films and watch them at least 3 times a week . The cut scenes do use actual film and Ani-Matrix footage but they aren't represented well with the scripting of the story. To counter the convoluted story and its script, the game play and its pacing are spot on, and even then it's bogged down by some lack of polish and by some mundane level design.
After you are "freed", you start being trained by Morpheus and are acquainted with the weaponry within the game, swords, guns and fists. The fighting controls on all of these fighting styles are spot on but the gun play has more to be desired from. You can perform several acrobatic maneuvers with the guns but they never tend to help as they are intended to do and sometimes they actually hinder your progression. The combat is quite simple to learn and fun to master as you grapple enemies and input button commands to fight your enemies. You can sometimes use your combos on 3- 5 guys at once or disarm one guy and use his weapon to kill his buddy. There are so many different ways to kill your opponents it never gets old and because the fighting evolves with your character, you acquire better, stronger moves. These range from grabbing a guy in the air smacking him on the ground and then throwing him like a discos or jumping from a wall and grabbing a guy by his neck and throwing him across the room. Like its predecessor the game uses the focus system to dodge/stop bullets and pull off the plethora of moves. The problem with the focus system comes when you run out of it and all your enemies are shooting at you, they tend to hit you with several bullets no matter how close or far you're from them. Another problem concerning the combat of the game comes with the lack of polish concerning the hit detection. Sometimes you can be hiding behind a pillar or any large structure and bullets will magically hit you, although it doesn't happen often, it does become noticeable when playing on harder difficulties.
The environments in Path of Neo are small but detailed in the sense that most of it can either be destroyed or mutilated. Anything from a sign or trash can be hurled thanks to Neo's powers and can be used to dispose of enemies quickly. The character models on the other hands tend to be very low poly and have this weird rubber band neck. During the in game cut scenes you notice all the defects in their models but during combat you they're barely noticeable. Thanks to the low polygonal count you can experience bigger fighting sequences and even the infamous Burly Brawl in the second film, disappointingly you only versus 7 Smiths at once. Ironically the games frame rate doesn't drop during these fights as much as it does when you're fighting 2-3 guys at once , luckily that doesn't happen often and isn't that noticeable. Before I end off this review I must complement Shiny for implementing physics and lighting system in the game, which adds to some of the ambience the game, has. The enemy AI on the other hand is a mixed bag as sometimes it uses cover and fires at you non-stop or sometimes get stuck in a wall or just completely stops shooting you when your fighting his buddy .
Overall Path of Neo is an enjoyable beat'em up coupled with several problems and if you hated the ending of the 3rd movie , the game features an alternate ending with a boss battle featuring Agent Smith the size of King Kong .The battle itself isn't that good but it makes more sense then the Matrix Reloaded.