Review – Singularity

Singularity has one concept that I love in any type of game, time manipulation. Few games these days uses this really powerful idea, I wish more games would. With that said does the game take advantage of this concept?

You are generic American captain Renko insert last name here. The year is 2010 (most of the time). You are sent to Kartoga 12 an island in the east coast of Russia to investigate an abnormal amount of radiation found by American Satellites. In this island a lot of weird things happens, like crazy mutations and a shift between time. As the story progresses you go back in past and change the future for the worst. Now you have to re-write the present and try make things right.

You have a weapon called Time Manipulation Device (TMD for short) this weapon allows you to go back in the past, turn enemies to dust, and few other things. You have help from the creator of the TMD, Dr. Barisov and a woman named Kathryn. Your main goal is to destroy the Singularity in order to stop the Russians from making K12 bombs. Your only enemies are Russian soldiers and mutated monsters who will attempt to stop from reaching your goal. The plot is there but it never really pulls you in, it is cliche and lacks twists which will make you care very little for what is going.

The gameplay of the game is your generic shooter, while the controls are very accurate it does not do a good job in setting itself apart from the hundreds of shooters out there. The TMD (which plays a lot like the plasmid from Bioshock) you can use to kill enemies, alter objects in the map, slow down your enemies and other things. Unlike games like Call of Duty your health doesn’t regenerate over time, you have a health meter in this game, you can heal with medical kits you find throughout the stages. One MAJOR annoyance of this game is the lack of ammo, sometimes you will be thrown to the middle of a huge battle with little to no ammunition, making it very hard to get past the section.

When I think of time manipulation in a game I think about puzzles you have to solve using time manipulation. In Singularity there are no puzzles what so ever, the all game is a shooter with the slight advantage of having the TMD, the execution lacks potential of the great weapon you have and ends up being nothing but wasted potential.

The looks of the game are very gray and sad, which is perfect emphasis of the situation, but I can’t help but to feel depressed by looking at this game. The graphics are good but for someone who prefer more colorful games like Mario or Donkey Kong the visuals turned me off. The music/SFX were pretty generic, nothing really grabbed my attention. One cool thing however is the weapons, in particular The Seeker, this weapons allows you to control your bullets in any direction you want, when they impact the enemy it’s really cool watching the explosion in combination with the dismembered body.

Singularity is not a bad game, it’s not a good game, and it’s a below average game. There is nothing in this game that will surprise or wow you, everything from the story to the game play is pretty generic. If the execution of the TMD was better this could had been a great game that sets itself apart from other FPS, unfortunately it wasn’t. Aside from the weapons there is barely anything above average in this game, and With 6 hours of single player campaign and multiplayer matches that can take 30 minutes to gather players, it is safe to say that you should not buy this game.

It’s a different type of shooter that borrows elements from other games, and applies it pretty well. If you want a different FPS this game is not for you, if you want a decent type of FPS maybe you should rent this game. Either way I highly discourage you from buying Singularity, you’ll wish you could go back in the past and stopped yourself.

Rewind Replay Score – 67 (F)
Singularity was reviewed on Playstation 3.