Singularity review

From the get go, Singularity has widely been portrayed as a low-rent BioShock, but after a few hours of play, its true inspiration becomes more readily apparent: Half-Life 2. While your female buddy is admittedly no Alyx Vance, the TMD knocks Gordon Freeman’s gravity gun into a cocked hat. Better still, it’s only one facet of this game’s extraordinary arsenal.

Singularity’s narrative is sub-BioShock, hokey sci-fi fare. You’re heroic US Air Force pilot Nate Renko, trapped on the Ruski isle of Katorga-12 – home to all manner of nefarious experiments with the element E99. When a brutal dictator pokes his nose in, things go a bit Island of Dr Moreau, a devastating time-continuum cock-up occurs and the 50s Cold War timeline gets royally messed up. Cue sole responsibility for manipulating time and saving the world falling on Renko.

The manipulation involves a combo of basic puzzling mostly involving using the TMD to rewind time and restore rusty gear, though look out for massive alterations and dazzling shootouts. We’d need ten pages to detail them all, but whether you’re aging a Russian trooper so his skeleton crumbles, devolving him into a blind savage who turns on his comrades, creating a temporal field bubble and pumping the frozen foes within it full of lead before watching the bubble disappear and them explode, or simply gorily gibbing nearby baddies with a burst of temporal energy, the blasting is fresh, exciting, dynamic, and never afraid to mix things up.

So what if the shooting’s often spongy, the health system frustratingly archaic and the visuals dated and uneven? Terrific weapons, powers and boss scraps mean the good times come thick and fast with this cult classic.

Jul 7, 2010