Singularity

Lets see if any of this sounds familiar : Evil Nazi, Mutants, other worldly powers, Mutated Nazis, Ravensoft. No it's not a sequel to that horrible Wolfenstein remake, its Singularity. Singularity is yet another swipe from Ravensoft about how much Nazis suck. I'm not saying Singularity is a lazy re-edit of Wolfenstein with new abilities.....oh wait that's almost exactly what it is.

Singularity tells the story of Captain Nathaniel Renko who is on his way to investigate why an American spy satellite was destroyed so they end up flying to a secret island called Katorga-12 but suddenly another electromagnetic pulse(Think the Citadel explosion after effect in Half Life) downs the helicopter he's in. So far so familiar. Through a series of events you learn that Katorga-12 wasn't meant to be found (Think about Bioshock) which has discovered a secret mineral called ADAM Element 99 which is basically a miracle maker and can do almost anything. Of course people abused it and ended up fucking everything up.

Ok honesty time, I didn't really get to finish Singularity partly because it was so horribly bad I couldn't bare to take it. The controls are probably the only decent thing since it controls like any generic FPS out now. The guns lack any punch, you can empty 2 clips before the most basic monsters go down and upgrading does absolutely NOTHING to help out. The environment is pretty crappy too. Messy, brown and blown up buildings is all you'll see. EVERYTHING is blown up. There isn't any indication to where you are suppose to go either, you can spend hours circling the same 4 rooms until you either get lucky and find the right way or eject the disk and snap it in half (Gamefly wouldn't like that though). Singularity wants you to scavenge and get ammo, health, etc but since everything looks the same you'll end up getting yourself lost. The enemies can take tons of damage and kill you in a few hits which totally throws off that balance thing that's so necessary in games.

There's one thing that I really liked about Singularity and that was the gimmicky Time Manipulation Device which was awesoomeee. I admit having fun aging and renewing items for awhile and there are some parts that leave you going "Holy shit that was amazing!" but after the initial charm is gone they shit on it. They only have you using it to renew stairs and boxes to move along places you need to go. The TMD had so much potential but they didn't really use it. You can use it on enemies and watch them turn to dust or become enraged and attack the enemies attacking you but the thing is, it's not practical when you're in a firefight against tons of soldiers and monsters.

The story of Singularity is so ridiculous you'll get lost from the get go. You are apparently trying to get to the other side of the island but then time cuts back to the past before everything went to hell and you save some guy from a burning building then you need to back in time and save some scientist from dying but then *SPOILERS(?)* I guess he turns out to be the bad guy in the future when you save him in the past and them some other stuff happens (I told you I didn't finish it!) then I guess you kill him, get off the island and the game ends. If you're trying to follow the story, you'll need to play-through it again or just look up the wiki (I recommend the later).

Lastly Singularity doesn't know what genre it wants to be. I know it says Sci-Fi FPS but it tries to copy other mods. It tries the Horror Genre and has you going through a creepy school with ghostly voices and things moving around on their own then it switches to a fast paced FPS gunfight Genre when Nazis descend and start filling you with holes then it goes to Platforming that has you jumping from tiny ledges and well timed places and finally it goes the campy Fallout-esque route with its vintage cartoons explaining Element-99 and its run backwards shooting Super Mutants Mutants hoping you don't run out of hallway.

All and all Singularity is like a game developer raided your game collection of your best games, took pieces of them and tried to make a decent game from their organs and sadly it didn't work. take out the Time Device and Singularity is your average boring shooter that does almost nothing right.