Singularity

Rating: M

Score: 9.0/10

Off the top of your head, how many First-Person Shooters have you heard of/seen/played? It's probably a large double-digit number (maybe a triple-digit if you're REALLY nerdy). First-Person Shooters need some unique aspects to draw attention nowadays, or be a huge company name to milk money from the fans *coughHalocough*. Singularity's new aspect is a hand with special powers (Bioshock went there) that controls gravity (Half-Life did that) and controls time (And not in any slow-mo stuff either, so that's original). Unfortunately, it's probably going to sink to the depths of the unknown thanks to similar bigger games even though it's actually really good. This game is available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

The story goes you are a soldier sent to investigate the remains of what used to be a hidden Russian island known as "Katorga-12", where E-99 was mass-produced during the Cold War to get the edge on those Americans. E-99 is a powerful substance that the Russians believed to be the key to winning the "war" (if you would call it that), but the plant gets blown up along with most of the island, and the Russian Government, being the sneaky conspirators they are (or are always made out to be by these American developers- I guess emotional scars don't heal as fast), decide to hide the island's existence, and this is where you come in. You're sent to investigate the strange island radiating E99 radioactivity.

You find a Time-Manipulation Device (TMD), which you can use to renew aged objects or age objects. This may sound weird, but what happens to a lock after thousands of years? It corrodes off and breaks. This new hand-upgrade can age objects to break, die, get crushed, or corrode, and renewing can fix pretty much everything. It's used as a general "fix broken stairs to continue" most of the time, but it also gets a little usage as a clever puzzle-solver. For example, you can renew a metal block and use it to reach a high area, then lift it up and age it to corrode and flatten it, then slide it under a partially-open garage door and renew it to have the metal block force the garage door open.

You can also use it to take on soldiers, but it's costly on fuel, which is rare enough as it is. So, you can always use the slower means , i.e. a gun. Gun selection is pretty standard: Shotgun, machine gun, revolver, grenade launcher, chaingun. You can upgrade yourself and your weapons at special stations using collected E99 and Upgrade Points as money, which Bioshock did as well. For Bioshock fans, just replace TMD with Plasmids, TMD Cells with EVE, E99 as ADAM, and Upgrade Points as the Power to The People stations themselves. You can spend on stuff like more health, more damage with guns, longer sprinting, etc. Nothing is really expensive, but everything in general is really expensive. Adding extra abilities to yourself costs X amount of E99. You can only equip one single ability at the beginning of the game, so you need to spend Y amount of money (Y being > X) get another slot to equip what you already bought. Usually, X = a decent amount of E99 while Y = Outrageous amount of E99. All together you're spending a lot to buy one single thing.

The game does an excellent job of keeping things fresh with multiple bosses, and new gameplay styles mixed in with the shooting and renewing/aging. Some sections you're sneaking around trying to not alert strong enemies, then you're doing physics puzzles, then you're using hot lead to pierce fleshy skin, then you're running around a sinking ship looking for a bomb, not wanting to be too slow or you'll go down with the ship; it's all over the place. Unfortunately, it's not a very long game overall, and it's slow to get into it at first. Once it starts to speed up, you'll probably play until you see the end (or just about).

The TMD can do some extra cool stuff too, offering tons of really cool ways to defeat enemies. You can put them in a "deadlock" (a time-distorted field where, in a limited range, time is between super-slow to stopped) and shoot bullets into the deadlock, and wait for the deadlock to disappear and the bullet to hit the enemy. You can also toss heavy objects at them Half-Life style, or use the TMD to focus a large amount of E99 in a devastating melee attack that will no doubt rip apart every single molecule from the other. If you're boring or out of TMD cells you can just shoot them.

It's an interesting experiment, but it doesn't seem to be a game long enough, nor a story clever enough, to be "complete". The plot twist is directly related to the first 15 minutes of the game and nothing else, so the whole middle bit was just left to do whatever it needed to so it'd go through plenty of fun, and then end. The fact you randomly switch between time periods is cool, but not completely original. The same goes for most of the TMD, and most of the gameplay. The whole package, though, is unlike anything you'd ever play. I'd love to see a sequel made, but it's unlikely one would be made based off the endings (any of them), and maybe this kind of game would be best known as a visitor that dropped by and then vanished.