Review: Singularity (PC)
In Singularity, you play BJ Blazkowicz fighting the Nazi paranormal units, taking place in Isenstant. You gain super powers when you find the Thule medallion which lets you slow down time..wait wait wait wait – thats Wolfenstein, not Singularity, although you wouldn’t be blamed for confusing the two. Both games are from Raven Software (the studio who gave us wonders like HeXen, Heretic, Soldier of Fortune (1 & 2), Jedi Knight Outcast and even XMen Legends), both feature historical weaponry/settings, both feature special powers, and both had a somewhat frustrating upgrade system to the devices that gave you the special powers.
In Singularity, you play Nate Renko who is thrown between modern day and 1955 on the elusive and fictional Russian island, Katorga-12. Kotorga-12 is the only known source of Element99, which in turn gives the scientists there the ability to manipulate time. The Time Manipulation Device (TMD) is the main draw card for Singularity – it acts as a gravity gun, shield and weapon. I will say this, while Singularity is better than Wolfenstein, neither are stand out games. While Wolfenstein just lacked punch and was overall too repetitive, Singularity‘s main draw is the TMD – but in reality, that was its only draw, as the game overall feels like yet another generic shooter.
The game is short – only taking four or five hours to stomp through, the enemies are either mutated creatures which can teleport (but due to somewhat dumb AI never bother doing that to get the advantage on you) or Russian soldiers (either Cold War era or modern) who are happy enough to line up and die in an orderly fashion. The weapons the enemy have are no match for the arsenal you can get – such as a time manipulating sniper rifle, a rail gun, or a gun which slows time so much you can actually steer the bullet. While these sound fun at first, combined with the overpowered TMD, the game just becomes boring – a game isn’t fun if it doesn’t challenge you on some level. That isn’t to say there aren’t genuine moments of "zomg that was so cool" when you first get the weaponry, but those moments were spread so thin throughout the game.
Once interesting tidbit is that this Raven game doesn’t use any of iD’s Tech engines, but instead uses Unreal Engine 3. During the peak of the id Tech 3 based games, Raven produced four hugely successful games, not to mention paved a lot of the way with a string of hits using the id Tech 2 engine. Heck, Raven even created (the somewhat lacklustre) Quake 4 – that’s saying something about how involved they’ve been with iD tech over the years. Now, this isn’t their first Unreal Engine 3 based game (X-Men Origins: Wolverine was), but it still came as a bit of a surprise to me. Despite years of working with iD Tech, Raven are relatively new with UE, and it shows – it suffers a hilarious bug where textures just stop loading (or take 10-20mins to load). This is a feature of UE3, where textures stream in to create a smoother loading experience, rather than loading all at once and slowing down the system.
As you can see from the above image the gun is fantastically detailed but the rest of the game looks terrible. More often than not, while playing Singularity, I was faced with this problem. Apparently there are now workarounds, and Raven are looking into it but it is somewhat of a big flaw.
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