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Genre: First-Person Shooter Publisher: Activision Developer: Raven Software Players: 1-12

By Keith B (7th Jul 2010)

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if that old adage rings true, then you can pick out with relative ease the various inspirations that have influenced the development team as they built Singularity. It would be fair to say that just about every FPS has been influenced to some degree by the industry and its success stories, and not unlike the God of War series being referenced through a whole wave of recent hack and slash games, Singularity sidles up to BioShock and carefully notes down all the good stuff.

The references to the adventures in Rapture exist in more ways that just a similar era though. In fact, particularly at the start of the game, it’s hard to focus on playing while your mind is occupied with thoughts like: “Are you kidding me? This is exactly like BioShock”. It’s true. The health and energy bars are the same. You have an arm-mounted device that gives you powers, like plasmids. You come across machines in the game world to upgrade your weapons or equipment. The range of powers available is like a dumbed-down plasmid rethinking. Scattered everywhere are audio logs, there to provide the back story. This is not new. It is, however, capable.

You play as Captain Nathaniel Renko, and American sent to remote Russian island Katorga-12 to investigate a massive radiation spike. The island has been abandoned since the 1950s, when an experiment went wrong and an explosion wreaked havoc. Today, Renko discovers the facility was working on E99, a new scientific element discovered on the island. The failed experiment showed the Russians that E99 has the power to warp time, but the scale of the disaster prevented further research.



Expectedly, things go wrong right away. Renko is dumped on the island after his helicopter crashes, and it’s not long before shambling, flesh eating creatures are wandering the corridors and the player is being given some serious weaponry to blast them to pieces.

Renko soon discovers the Time Manipulation Device (TMD), and the game really takes off.
Singularity has banked on the hope that gamers wouldn’t dismiss the notion of manipulating time, because it is the driving mechanism to everything. Combat becomes laced with time events, as you age enemies to dust while firing a massive assault cannon into their faces. The time element is used in puzzles, although these are rarely taxing in any way. Rewind time on a broken staircase and it will mend itself, or age a crate and it will crumple, then carry it and stick it under a half-opened roller door and rewind time et voila, crate assumes older position of being not-crumpled and forces door open. Most of these are cool when you first come across them, but after you’ve put the tenth crate under a door you’ll not find any enjoyment in it.



Aside from the device attached to your arm, combat is facilitated by some awesome hardware, although this massive weaponry does mean that the game can be a little easy, particularly towards the end. The sniper rifle, for example, allows you to click in a thumbstick and slow down time, a power which regenerates pretty quickly. It’s entirely possible to waltz through an encounter against the meanest foes by slowing time, putting six rounds in their head, and then hiding as the bar refills and you reload your weapon.

Picking up the in-game cash will allow you to augment and upgrade a range of perks (sound familiar?). While the ones that impact the player (regain TMD energy with every kill, regenerate 25% of life when not in combat, and so on) are useful and well implemented, the weapon side is rather lacklustre. Three categories exist for each weapon, and each category can be upgraded twice. That’s all.



Multiplayer is a mix of both good and bad, but unfortunately mainly the latter. There are two game modes – Extermination (control and hold points on the map) and Creatures vs Humans (deathmatch). There are only three maps, and each side has four character classes. Coming from Wolfenstein developers Raven Software, Singularity feels very similar to last year’s ‘Stein game, although the online gameplay brought flashes of 2007’s ill-fated Shadowrun, primarily because of its simplicity, but I found there to be something rather endearing about online play with Singularity. The first night I played for about four hours online, and it was quite good. There, again, are similarities with another FPS - Left 4 Dead - as you run around puking on people or pummeling them with brute force.

Unfortunately it refused to work for three consecutive days after that. The second day, I couldn’t find any games (none at all), and was forced to join a game through my recent players list. Then it kept repeatedly booting me after only a few seconds of play (on more than one occasion I thought I saw a message appear on the left of the screen saying: “You’re about to be kicked for cheating” but can’t be sure. If that wasn’t bad enough, often when I did find a lobby I sat there for ages waiting for it to start. The matchmaking is awful and when the message appears announcing “A new player is connecting...” you might as well go and make a cup of tea because it takes AGES for someone to connect. Throw in complete lobby drops when the host quits and it can be hard to manage to complete a round.



I find this to be a little sad because although the multiplayer has horrible issues with its matchmaking, I found myself really enjoying the simplistic approach. Although the online may not last, the single player campaign is worth the price of entry alone, and if you can ignore the cheap rent-a-Communist voice acting and the blatant similarities to other games (lessons at the start of the game are filled with cutesy cartoon figures, just like Fallout 3. Sorry, I’ll stop now), you’ll find a solid eight or ten hours of play time here. There are twists and turns, multiple endings, and when the credits roll, the enduring feeling is a positive one.

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