Singularity

I suppose warning lights should have come on in my brain when:

1) We didn't hear anything about Singularity at this years E3
2) It was quietly released a couple of days ago with no adverts, previews or pre-release hype at all. When that happens, it's likely that the publishers know the game is shit and they're trying to slip it to the punters before the press notice.

But whatever, I thought, I'm not paying for it, I may as well see what it's like.

Singularity is... a fantastic example of everything that's wrong with games.

For example, your character doesn't talk. This *has* worked in the past, notably with Portal & COD4: Modern Warfare but it's usually a lazy device used by games who are trying to cover up the fact that they don't have a plot.

Then there's the plot.

The Russians invented an awesome piece of weapons tech back in the 50s. It exploded and the Island has been sealed off since then. Sixty years later the US military decide they want to know what that was all about so they send in two helicopters full of troops. Onto Russian Soil.

I'm pretty sure that's technically an invasion...

Anyhoo, the helicopter is stuck by a mysterious device, you black out and wake up on a pier (gaming cliche #332, used by every unoriginal game since Half Life). Then there are some generic zombie monsters and gameplay which is very, very like FEAR but not as good. Then the Russian Military turn up.

It's at this point that I have to talk about the gameplay a little bit. Apart from one thing, which I'll come to in a moment, there's nothing especially wrong with the gameplay, it's just that it's highly generic. Everything's instantly familiar. There was something slightly wrong, though, so at one point when me and my AI buddy were outnumbered 30:1 by the Russian Military, I stopped shooting at them and just watched.

They were all spraying our hiding spot with bullets but they were all bouncing off the window frames to create cinematic ricochets.

Now, even ignoring the fact that I was so disengaged with the game after half an hour of gameplay I chose to see how the underlying mechanics of the game worked, it's not a good sign when the game has the AI purposely try to not kill you.

Then you and your mate get captured and the EVIL RUSSIAN VILLAIN turns up (not so much a gaming cliche but a callback to bad films form the 1970's and 80's - that's worse than a gaming cliche - that's something the entire world accepts is cliched). Incidentally, we know this Russian is evil because he's wearing a huge fur coat and spits when your buddy mentions the Geneva convention.

Yeah, I'm not even going to bother analysing that any further.

It turns out, by the way, that the Russians are there to grab a time manipulating device, which you then get their hands on.

The more astute of you will now be wondering: "So this Island's been unoccupied for 60 years and yet the Russian Military chose to come and get the device... now. Just when there HAPPENS to be a US military expedition to the island."

Seriously, the plot is so contrived and rubbish that it makes the incredibly shoddy gameplay look half decent.

The time manipulation stuff doesn't really work either. You're supposed to be able to age or revert anything using your magical glove so if you see a ladder that's broken, you simply reverse time around the ladder so it reverts to a state when it wasn't broken.

The problem is, that's a mechanic that's clearly open for abuse so they limit it to only working on very specific things. I couldn't, for example, reverse time on a caved in tunnel to when the tunnel was no longer caved in.

As I understand it (I never actually played it) this was the problem Red Faction had - they wanted to make everything destructible but you can't make *everything* destructible so they put a load of really arbitrary and annoying restrictions in there.

This is understandable but it's not handled with any of the skill that the portals are in Portal. The places you can place the portals in Valves masterpiece are really rather limited but it feels natural - it all makes sense.

Not here, though.

So yes, Singularity is really, really bad in every quantifiable way. I'd like to give them marks for effort but I'm not sure I can even do that. The graphics are quite nice I suppose. There's a really nice bit *right* at the start when you're approaching the island and you fly past the remains of a Soviet Statue - which is just a hand holding a sickle poking out of the sea. That was quite nice.

There we go, ended on a positive note.