Singularity Review

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Singularity marks a departure for Raven Software, the team behind the recent Wolfenstein reboot, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The studio finally has a chance to work on an original property and the result is a game that borrows stylistic elements from their previous sci-fi laden shooter and relies on the team’s pedigree for crafting solid mechanics. The game begins as Nathaniel Renko, member of an American military outfit, is on a reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union’s defunct island, Katorga 12. Singularity’s story portrays an alternate timeline that retells history as if the USSR never disbanded. The island of Katorga 12 was an all-important part of the country’s rise to power. A new element containing incredible power, dubbed E99, was discovered underneath the surface. If wielded correctly, E99 could even manipulate time itself. Like any dubious evil power, the Soviets sought to exploit it. Renko & Co. are marooned on the island decades after it was abandoned in the 1950s. Things quickly take a turn as you realize the past is finally catching up with them.



The effects of the experiments have taken their toll on Katorga 12 and its inhabitants. They’re now horrible creatures, mutated by the power of E99, and they’re coming for you. Singularity’s first impression is striking, taking influence from games such as Bioshock and Metro 2033, the world of Katorga 12 is detailed, haunting, and rich with character. Art-deco elements mixed with Red Army propaganda give Singularity a distinct look and sense of place. It's just a shame the early environments later give way to some generic industrial warehouses. At times, the world can feel a bit contrived. Backwards R’s and N’s on your objectives give the game a “Russiany” look, I suppose, but it’s forgivable when you realize it’s all in good fun. Singularity isn’t trying to be Tolstoy, more like a Hollywood blockbuster’s Russian counterpart. Jerry Bruckheimervich, if you will. Somewhere along the way, history is altered. An evil man has seized power and taken over the world. It’s now up to Renko to travel through time to set things right.

Singularity sits on a foundation of solid first-person shooting mechanics. The ubiquitous pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle are naturally part of your arsenal but weapons which tie into the game's time-travel motif are the standouts. The Seeker, a rifle that fires bullets you control as they travel through the air is pure masochistic fun. Other weapons like the sniper rifle have the ability to slow down time so pesky headshots are a thing of the past. In addition to the fun weaponry, Singularity relies heavily on a time mechanic afforded by the TMD or Time Manipulation Device.

Those mad Russian scientists managed to wield the power of E99 and create a handy (and portable, no less) weapon that can either turn back the wheels of time or move them forward. Use the TMD to age locks into dust allowing doors to open, turn enemies into ash, and restore broken staircases to their former selves. The time mechanics are, unfortunately, limited. It would have been nice to see more freedom in who or what you can move through time but, as it is, the game has a set library of objects that are susceptible to time manipulation. Mild puzzles are also sprinkled in for good measure but don’t go beyond simply figuring out how to traverse the environment. I felt like the time mechanics had so much potential, I wished the game had more of an emphasis on these puzzles. As the game progresses, upgrades to the TMD keep the action fresh and the game incredibly well paced. In another nod to Bioshock, the world is littered with upgrade stations which allow you to trade in currency for enhancements to yourself, your weapons, or the TMD itself. While Singularity doesn’t offer the dual-wielding of TMD and guns as Bioshock 2 did for plasmids and weapons, the action doesn’t suffer. The steady upgrades ensure that, even though you’re fighting the same enemy types throughout, the methods are constantly evolving and keep things feeling new.

As Renko leaps between the 1950s and the present, you’ll dispatch plenty of Russian soldiers along the way. The occasional boss battle against a gigantic monster keeps things leaning back into the realm of sci-fi. While these encounters offer some of the game’s more dramatic set pieces, it’s a shame they fall prey to the same “shoot-the-giant-glowing-spot” syndrome.

As a whole, Singularity isn’t a particularly long game. Most will get through it in a little under eight hours. It’s right in the sweet spot between offering just enough and overstaying its welcome. Fans of story-driven games will have a hard time putting it down. Bioshock-esque audio logs, notes, messages from the past which are rendered legible by the TMD, and a headache-inducing time twist really flesh out the narrative. In the end, a moral choice offers a variety of endings depending on which route you take. While the ending itself is interesting regardless of your choice, it was another area where the story felt contrived. None of your choices throughout the game up until that moment factor in to which ending you receive. It felt forced that suddenly the game introduced a moral choice when, all the while, you’d been doing what you thought was right.

Despite being a single-player focused game, Singularity does offer a decent multiplayer offering. While the standard deathmatch pitting human soldiers against the monsters of Katorga 12 is a fun, class-based distraction, it’s not likely to pull you away from your current online game of choice. Extermination is another game mode that, once again, pits humans versus creatures but is more objective-based. As the soldiers, it’s your duty to restore beacon points and protect them while they charge. As the monsters, it’s your job to stop them. If a team works well together, Extermination can actually get quite addictive. Soldier classes range from the typical medic, spec-op, and heavy units while the creatures offer a little more variety. The multiplayer isn’t the main draw of the game but it’s worth putting in for a weekend and seeing what it has to offer.

Singularity isn’t the most original game but it still manages to do a few things very well. The world of Katorga 12 is not the next Rapture but it’s damn close. Added to that, a time-travel mechanic, great shooting, and mind-bending story all work to shape a rich experience that’s worth seeing through to the end.

Picross 3D Review

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Nintendo has a knack for creating simple yet absolutely addictive puzzle games. The original Picross on the DS was a clever play on Sudoku-style grid puzzling, with the added twist of pictures being produced by eliminating squares. Removing squares on the grid is based on a logical elimination based on numbers marking the rows and columns. For example, if a row of 5 squares has a number 5 attached to the end, then all 5 are safe and nothing is taken out. If the row were marked with a 3 then, naturally, 3 squares would remain and 2 must be eliminated. Finding out which squares, however, is the tricky part. The game continually adds levels of complexity, being sure not to overwhelm but still give players a challenge. Nintendo has taken things one step and one dimension further with Picross 3D.



No longer on a 2-D plane, the puzzles now have the added challenge of depth as players will chip away at a block of cubes, following the same rules of logic, to create little figures. It might sound confusing but thanks to a hefty tutorial the game is accessible and once you get sucked in there’s no going back. The game is more difficult than the original Picross in that some players may have a hard time wrapping their heads around the more third-dimension-centric aspects of the gameplay. The game lends a hand by providing sliders in order to cut into the objects in order to get a handle on the cubes. However, this proved to be one of the more difficult mechanics of the game to understand. By following the clues, being sure not to eliminate the wrong blocks, and completing puzzles, players are rewarded by a robot, dog, magnifying glass, and all manner of everyday objects. Speaking of puzzles, Picross 3D offers more than 300 and at $19.99 it’s easy to recommend the game as a great value that’s sure to occupy a lot of time.

The art style has taken a bizarre, pastel-focused turn that looks a bit cheap and juvenile. But, with gameplay mechanics as good as this, the game could have been in black and white and I really wouldn’t have cared. (In fact, Mario Picross came out on the Gameboy in black and white and it was just as much fun.) Customizable background images and music make the aesthetics a tad more tolerable but it’s worth mentioning Nintendo didn’t have to make the game look like a budget title.

The sliders that let you cut-into the blocks and examine the inside of the figures was a constant source of annoyance during the more difficult puzzles. Nintendo was smart enough to make players hold a button to chip away at a cube or mark it as safe. However, no such attention was paid to the sliders which often activated as I was trying to rotate the object rather than cut into it. I wish I could have held a button to activate it as I did with other elements.

I mentioned before that Picross 3D has a lengthy tutorial. It holds your hand perhaps a bit longer than it should. I appreciate the steady pace but it would have been nice to have the ability to skip ahead to more difficult levels. As it is, players have to progress through more than 100 Easy difficulty puzzles before getting a chance to take a crack at the Medium and Hard tiers.

Despite any minor problems I had with the game from an art-style or progression standpoint, these issues pale in comparison to the truly addictive nature of Picross 3D. The game is fun and has the uncanny ability to make you travel through time, unaware of how many hours are passing, as you keep tapping and saying “just one more.”

Image courtesy of Joystiq

Bioshock 2 Review

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It’s not too often a game is able to completely surprise you. When Bioshock 2 was first announced, my initial reaction was a mix of resistance and skepticism. As a fan of the first Bioshock, I was wary of how a sequel could undercut the richness of the original. These things must be done delicately. The first Bioshock was not perfect. The plot-twists made the last third of the narrative lose steam, the shooting mechanics felt somewhat hackneyed, and the hacking mini-game brought the pace to a dead halt. That being said, the real star of Bioshock was the city of Rapture. It was a fully realized world unlike anything gamers had seen before. Going in to play the sequel, some of that initial charm and awe of discovery regarding Rapture is lost as it’s not an entirely new experience. However, the team behind Bioshock 2 has made some improvements to the gameplay, shooting, and pacing issues that really make this a worthwhile sequel. As I said before, Bioshock 2 took me completely by surprise. I went in expecting to find something that didn’t quite live up to the first game. In this review, it would be almost impossible not to compare the sequel to the original. It may sound crazy, because I know there are fans out there who hold Bioshock in the highest regard, but in many ways the sequel actually surpasses it.



Bioshock 2 is set ten years after the events of the original. Much has happened since the fall of Rapture and the end of Andrew Ryan. In his place, Sofia Lamb, Ryan’s philosophical opposite, has taken over. Rather than supporting Ryan’s belief of complete independence from the system, Lamb embraces a more socialist view of uniting as one for the greater good. Her daughter Eleanor has been bound to you. As a prototype Delta unit Big Daddy that’s been separated from his Little Sister, the quest to reunite with her takes him through some of the oldest parts of Rapture. Returning to the underwater dystopia feels good and familiar, like a song you used to love or your Mom’s home cooking. My early concerns that this would somehow feel like a cheap cash-in on the Bioshock name were gone within the first few minutes once I realized the world is interesting enough to keep players content with exploring through another ten-hour experience.



Bioshock 2 addresses many of the issues contained in the first. The original was great, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t perfect. Everything in the sequel feels much more streamlined. Shooting is vastly improved. Players can now duel-wield between plasmids and firearms, making the combat far more efficient, fun, and open to experimentation. But the shooting overall, the sheer mechanics of aiming and firing, is much sharper. It feels more like a competent shooter which is, I assume, one of the reasons they added the multiplayer component— but more on that later.

As the Delta unit makes his way through Rapture, he’ll come across Little Sisters with their respective Big Daddies gathering Adam, the city’s all-powerful substance that drove people to madness. Players must defeat these “Mr. B” bodyguards and determine how to deal with the Little Sisters. The first Bioshock dabbled with the same morality structure of killing and harvesting them for a lot of Adam or saving the girls for slightly less. Depending on the player’s decision, the outcome this time around is much more than a different movie at the end of the game. In fact, Bioshock 2 encourages the adoption of the Little Sisters as the game’s best mechanic of gathering Adam was easily my favorite part of the experience.

Occasionally, Delta unit is tasked with protecting his adoptive Little Sisters as they gather Adam. During this time, Splicers, the crazed citizens of Rapture, will be attracted to the location, gunning for the girls. Fending them off, setting traps, and utilizing the game’s enhanced weaponry was addictive and, simply put, a blast to play. These horde-esque moments punctuated the action and were a fun diversion from the Bioshock formula. A strategy begins to emerge as Delta unit preps for the next Splicer onslaught, it’s great.



The game shies away from actual boss battles and with good reason. I imagine many would be hard-pressed to find people who absolutely loved the final encounter in the original Bioshock. The closest players will find to a boss in this game are the numerous run-ins with the Big Sisters. If a Big Daddy was the thing to fear in the first game, the Big Sisters are the equivalent. While not as tough as the Big Daddy seemed in the original, Big Sisters are grown up versions of Little Sisters who have taken to wearing a similar set of armor as their former bodyguards.

On the subject of difficulty, I found Bioshock 2 to be a wholly easier game than the first. Playing both games on Normal difficulty was a vastly different experience. I consider myself a moderately good player, nothing spectacular. I was surprised to see the Playstation trophy icon pop up for never using a Vitachamber (the game’s respawn system) as the credits began to roll. Meaning I never died during Bioshock 2. Whether or not other players have the same experience isn’t certain but it needs to be said that perhaps this is a more mass-market design. The game has its difficult moments, that’s for sure, but I was often so overpowered that, by the end of the game, I could take on pretty much any situation without fear of losing my progress.

Exploration has also been given a more streamlined approach. Gone is the ability to travel back to previous areas and while many will see this as a negative, at the very least it keeps the narrative moving forward. One word of advice— be sure to explore all possible areas within a level before moving on as the game moves along a train-track that only goes one way. While it feels inflexible, I myself didn’t have a need to back-track in the original Bioshock unless the game required it. The structure in Bioshock 2 is just as enjoyable. I still found myself obsessively searching every filing cabinet, every corner, and every Splicer for goodies before moving on.

Unfortunately, the environments of the game aren’t as varied to the same degree with which Bioshock fans are accustomed. The first took players to gardens, frozen fisheries, and everywhere in between. The sequel tends to exist within a lot of similar-looking offices, hotels, and apartment buildings. That’s not to say these levels look bad or were lazily conceived, it just didn’t have the same sense of variety. This could be a result of simply being a sequel and some of the magic of discovery is gone.



There are a few issues that went untouched. For the life of me, I don’t understand the need to make me tap right if I want to use a health pack. In a way, I see the strategy involved of waiting until my health gets lower before using a pack and risking death or playing it safe. But the system allows for Eve to be refilled automatically once it reaches zero if the player has a hypo available. It just seemed like an anachronistic design decision I wish had been rectified when crafting the sequel. In addition, the story of Bioshock 2 isn’t quite as strong as it could be and often feels shoe-horned into the experience.

Not only were fans hesitant to accept a sequel could be a good thing, but online multiplayer also didn’t seem to jive with some of the Bioshock diehards. But yet again Bioshock 2 surprises.

Set years before the original Bioshock timeline, the multiplayer has its own narrative, piecing together the civil war that erupted during the Ryan-Fontaine rivalry. Players can enter into a variety of multiplayer staples such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, a Little Sister-centric version of Capture the Flag, etc. In addition, the game takes cues from online heavyweights and incorporates a leveling-up system with perks and better weapons.The online is a fun distraction worthy of a long weekend. It isn’t going to replace player’s online standbys like Battlefield Bad Company or Modern Warfare but once players are dropped into a game throwing plasmids and shooting at fellow Rapturians, it can be a lot of fun.

Overall, Bioshock 2 is full of surprises. In many ways, the streamlined structure, improved gameplay mechanics, and faithful double-dip into Rapture paid off. The pacing is pitch-perfect, allowing me to even consider it to be the superior game over the original. While I wish some moments had been retooled to allow for greater difficulty, the game is not without some challenge and the harder modes only encourage the brave to play through it again. I realize I'm probably in the minority when I say that I prefer Bioshock 2 to the original but, story aside, it's a better game in terms of mechanics and on the whole a far more enjoyable experience.

Resident Evil 5 "Desperate Escape" Review

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Almost a year after Resident Evil 5 debuted, Capcom is releasing two packs of DLC. The first episode, Lost in Nightmares, fared well in our review, harkening back to the glory days of creepy mansion romping, cryptic puzzle solving, and classic Jill Valentine lock-picking. The second round of DLC titled "Desperate Escape" demonstrate the dynamic shift in game design the Resident Evil series has undergone in the last few years. Unlike the nostalgia-inducing experience that was Lost in Nightmares, Desperate Escape is an extension of the reboot design pioneered by Resident Evil 4. The creepy hallway puzzling is replaced by lots of gunfire and hordes of not-zombies. The episode chronicles Jill Valentine and Josh Stone, in an unseen part of Resident Evil 5, as they attempt to escape the Tricell Facility.

Gamers who were unwilling to embrace the changes to the franchise will most likely not be pleased with this batch of DLC. The chapter offers an incredible amount of firepower for Josh and Jill to dispatch the crowds of Majini. While the scares aren't derived from the same feeling of vulnerability as seen in Lost in Nightmares, the experience is definitely tense. Hundreds of enemies are out for blood and the game continually ramps things up as players move forward. Just when gamers feel they've finally gotten a leg-up on the enemies, another wave comes pouring in.

The duo make their desperate escape through a set of incredibly detailed environments. The Tricell Facility, the surrounding docks, and warehouses, have a tangible quality of dirt and decay. There's a particularly great level involving an expansive area with rocket turrets that players won't want to miss. It changes up the formula just slightly but reenforces the core mechanic of the DLC's design: keep moving forward. As a fan of Resident Evil 5, this episode is a welcomed addition to the experience. There are, however, a few moments where the design borders on sadistic.

Playing the game on 'Normal' really is that almost-perfect blend of challenge with small bouts of frustration. Problems arise when some of the same AI issues that first appeared in RE5 return with a vengeance. Playing the game solo, without a human co-op partner, can get frustrating. Josh, your AI-controlled partner on your first play-through, will often get in your way or otherwise be quite useless. Many Game Over screens were the result of my co-op partner dying without much I could do about it. Particularly, during the final countdown sequence, trying to keep Josh alive felt like an exercise in futility. However, players can easily overcome these problems. Play with a friend co-op, or devise strategies to weather the storm of enemies. It's not the most difficult experience players are likely to have this year, but if the AI were a tad smarter it could have been much more enjoyable.

That being said, there's still an incredible amount of stuff to enjoy with Desperate Escape beyond Jill Valentine's new double-knee drop nutcracker melee move. Like the first DLC, it comes with additional characters for the Mercenaires mode, Rebecca Chambers and Josh Stone. Fans of Resident Evil 0 will remember Rebecca from her days on the Gamecube. While the experience is short, over in about an hour, there's a lot of action packed in. To give readers an idea of just how much shooting, exploding, and flash-grenading is abound, an achievement for killing 150 Majini is available and I unlocked it halfway through my first play-through. For under $5.00 it's still an incredible deal for fans of the game, hardcore RE fanatics, trophy hunters, or those just looking to blow stuff up.