Singularity: Full Game Review For PC

creativity101 (57)in #gaming • 6 years ago (edited)

Singularity is a first-person shooter developed by Raven Software in 2010 and running on the Unreal 3 engine. It's a game that seemed to slip under a lot of people's radars myself included. It takes a lot of elements from other shooting games like stalk and Bioshock and throws in some original ideas of its own what you're left with is a pulpy gorgeously violent game that is enjoyable from start to finish.

THE STORY

Set in 2010, you take on the role of a soldier named Renko investigating a disturbance from an abandoned Soviet base. As Renko approaches the island amassive surge of energy takes out his helicopter and he's stranded on the base. Before being transported back to 1955 around the time when the island was originally destroyed it's at this time that he rescues a man from falling to his death before he is returned to an alternate 2010 to find that he's unintentionally rewritten history. Turns out this man known as demikhov is a real jerk and went on to take over the world.

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Franco then joins forces with a woman named Katherine and a scientist named berestov to acquire something called the time manipulation device or TMD for short which they plan to use to rewrite history and stop damaging. I won't say anything else about the story but I will say that most of the writing and the voice acting is pretty good overall. This whole time traveling idea is pretty much the central theme of the game and you'll frequently jumping back and forth between 2010 and 1955 altering the present as you complete certain objectives.

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Initially, the game is a pretty standard first-person shooter with a mix of old-school and modern shooting mechanics, you have a two weapon limit which you can switch out at any time, a fixed health bar, iron sights and a basic melee attack. Enemies consist of Spetsnaz soldiers patrolling the island and weird mutant land creatures that are the result of the events that unfolded years prior. The soldiers are simple enough to deal with whereas the mutants each have different tactics though these are pretty easy to figure out. It's not too long before you get your hands on the TMD though and things become a little bit different.

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The 10 b's most basic function is that it can alter certain items in the game world by either moving the item forward or backward for a time. Quite a few of the games puzzles require you to use the TMD to progress and they're not always blatantly obvious they do get frequently reused throughout the game however so it's easy to spot them as the game goes on. Aside from that the TMD also has some pretty nifty combat abilities that you'll be getting some serious mileage on your melee attack that's a narrow place with a knock back effect that can practically vaporize anything in range.

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Aside from advancing time on inanimate objects you can also use it on enemies causing them to literally turn to dust as they age the span of countless years right before your eyes that's awesome. You can also create a giant ball of energy called a def lock that's going to stop time for anything that gets stuck in it, lastly you can pick up objects in the world and just throw them around which is useful for climbing to certain out-of-the-way areas or just launching the odd explosive barrel at someone's face.

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That's not to say that you'll be using the TMD and nothing else in fact most of the weapons are genuinely great fun to use and quite effective. As I said before you can only carry two weapons at any one time which seems to be forcing you to choose a play style though this doesn't seem to be too much of a hindrance as the weapon you need for a certain area or encounter is often laying right on the ground just when you need it. Your basic Arsenal is made up of a shotgun, pistol and an assault rifle before you get your hands on some more devastating firepower. The autocannon is a higher powered minigun of sorts that will kill most enemies pretty damn easily and you even get to use a grenade launcher with controllable projectiles.

My favorite however is the seeker an explosive sniper rifle that lets you guide each bullet towards its target in slow motion. Along with the TMD all of these weapons can be upgraded so long as you've got the resources, the weapon upgrades require something called tech packs which you'll find throughout the game often in out-of-the-way places whilst the TMD and various other upgrades required $18.99 tech which will also find throughout the game though this is much more abundant, you don't get enough resources to upgrade anything but you don't really need to anyway even the basic shotgun and assault rifle are useful even at the end of the game and kill almost everything much too easily.

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This is the same with the TMD power-ups by about the halfway mark I'd pretty much upgraded all of the weapons I needed as well as all of renko's basic stats like health and energy and this is kind of a game's biggest fault is that it's just to fit giving, early on in the campaign you might be a bit stuck for health and ammo but by the end of the game the entire thing is a cakewalk. The fully upgraded health bar is huge and you'll be stocked up on med kits almost the entire time.

There's a few boss fights here and there but these encounters feature blatant glowing weak spots that even the most dim-witted game art would see a mile away. Some of the enemies you encounter later in the game can be a bit of a nuisance but certain abilities like death lock for instance make them a pushover as you can just freeze them in place and pump them full of bullets before they can even react.

I really wish they had explored the whole time-traveling idea a bit more those moments when you're minding your own business and then get randomly transported back to 1955 surrounded by confused Soviet soldiers are the definite highlights and they're needed more stuff like that. The only other thing I didn't like about this game was that it was too damn short, I think I finished it in about five or so hours.

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The last third of the game is literally non-stop balls-to-the-wall action where you've really settled into your powers and upgraded your weapons of choice at this point you're pretty much unstoppable and the game is just so much fucking fun that I'd run out of superlatives trying to explain how much I enjoyed it, I guess I just wished it went on a little bit longer. When I finished the story all I wanted to do was start a new campaign all over again I mean another hour or two would have made this much better.

GRAPHICS

There’s a minor issue is with the Unreal 3 engine I mean it looks pretty good for the most part and there's some really gorgeous looking atmospheric effects like thunderstorms but it often has a bit of a problem with texture streaming this is a problem that plagues a lot of unreal fringe and games but thankfully it can usually be fixed by editing the configuration file.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows® XP/Vista/Windows 7 (Does not support Windows 2000)
Processor: Intel Dual Core 2.8 GHz or AMD Ahtlon 64 x2 Dual-Core 4800+ or better
Memory: 1GB for XP, 2GB for Vista/Win7
Graphics: 3D hardware accelerator card required - 100% DirectX® 9.0c-compliant 256 MB video card and drivers*
DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c (Included)
Hard Drive: 8GB of uncompressed hard disk space (plus 400 MB for the Windows® swap file and 12 KB free for saved games)
Sound: 100% DirectX® 9.0c-compliant true 16-bit sound card and drivers
Other Requirements: A 100% Windows® XP/Vista/Windows 7-compatible computer system
Keyboard/Mouse:100% Windows® XP/Vista/Windows 7-compatible mouse, keyboard and drivers
*Supported Chipsets for Windows® XP/Vista/Windows 7
&nbsp - All NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GT 256 MB RAM and better chipsets (excluding 9400 cards)
&nbsp - All ATI Radeon™ X1800 256 MB RAM and better (excludes X1800 GTO, HD2400, HD2600, and HD3450)
&nbsp - Motherboard integrated video chipsets not supported
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REVIEW/RATING

Graphics 7/10
Sound 7/10
Gameplay 7/10
Controls 7/10
Effect 7/10

OVERALL REVIEW/RATING

7\10

DEVELOPER

Raven Software

PUBLISHER

Activision

GENRE

First-person shooter

MODE(S)

First-person shooter

RELEASE DATE

1 Jul, 2010

CONCLUSION

Raven Software truly made some of the best games for the FPS genre and singularity is definitely up there in that regard. I can't think of a time in recent years where I just had such fun playing a game where I could just sit back and pretty much enjoy the experience almost from start to finish. Yeah I got to be irritated early on when I got low on ammo or couldn't come to grips with the various controls for the TMD but these annoyances quickly passed. Some people might be turned off by the more derivative mechanics in the game like the iron sights and all that kind of stuff but they're missing out on a truly awesome game over something so trivial. At the end of the day I'd have no problems recommending this to anyone.