Singularity

Post-Launch Review

Singularity (PC)

Developer: Raven Software

Publisher: Activision

Released: June 29 2010

About

Singularity is a first-person shooter following Captain Renko, an American soldier sent to investigate a radiation surge on a Russian island. He discovers an abandoned research facility that had been working on a new material called E-99 with incredible energy and reality-bending properties. Renko quickly discovers the alarming time-shifting effects of E-99 when he is sent to the past and screws up the timeline, so he sets out to fix what he's broken, fighting his way through mutants and soldiers alike, hopping between 2010 and 1955, and slowly discovering that everything is not as it seems, even after considering all the time travel anomalies.

At Launch

The game received generally favourable reviews. Some criticized it for its resemblance to other shooters (notably Bioshock) while others praised it for taking elements from other games and making them its own. Others criticized Singularity for forcing the awesomely versatile time travel mechanic into the linearity of a first person shooter.

Post Launch

Singularity received only one patch to fix a texture bug at high resolutions and a networking bug. In early 2011, Singularity was nominated for the Writers' Guild Video Game Writing Award, but did not win.

The Good

Opening Sequence

After a nice intro video placing the game's fictional history within the context of real history, your recon team crash-lands on the forgotten Katorga-12 research facility. The first location you encounter is the island's welcome centre. It's full of old propaganda: very upbeat and anti-US. It's neat to see a bit of the other side of the Cold War, which in North America is traditionally depicted as the good guys (United States) versus the evil bad guys (Russian communists). You find some audio recordings giving hints to the history of the facility, such as how it went into decline after the head scientist died in a fire. It's all very Bioshock, in a good way: a once-glorious abandoned facility with bits and pieces of history scattered around.

Then you get your first hint of time travel. After a blast of energy you find yourself in the middle of a fire. Without thinking, you pull a man out, saving his life. Turns out you just rescued the head scientist who had died in the fire — except now he hasn't. When you return to your time, the room is different and you find an audio recording about how well the facility is doing since the head scientist was saved from that fire. DUN DUN DUNNNNNN.

Writing & Pacing

The writing in Singularity is superb. Everything is interrelated and timestreams cross each other at every opportunity, but it all makes sense if you puzzle it out. There are lots of little moments that work really well — at one point they managed to make me afraid of a room full of children. The plot blazes right along, introducing the alternate history along with the dangers and effects of time travel all in the opening level.

You start off in exploration mode, with a destination in mind but searching for information and clues on the way. When you meet back up with a squadmate you go into action-sequence escort mode — but he won't move forward without you, which gives you time to look for hidden stuff.

You hop back and forth between 1955 and 2010, creating a very complicated but awesome timeline and further messing with it in various ways. I saved a guy, then went back in time and killed him again, because it turned out that saving him screwed up the timestream.

You find cryptic messages written on the walls, seeming to have been written by someone with knowledge of the future. Especially towards the end, these messages make you stop and think — one asks, “what if this was supposed to happen?”, forcing you to question how you determine which time stream is the “right” one, and whether “fixing” the time stream is the right thing to do in the first place.

Time Manipulation

The ability to age or de-age certain objects at will is awesome and makes for some neat puzzles. For example, there's a door stuck almost closed, so I age a crate so that it crumples flat, place it under the door, and de-age it again to force the door up. It is fairly liner and specific in that only certain objects can be manipulated, but it makes me FEEL like I have a lot more control, especially since only a few things are mandatory to advance, while others give you neat little insights into what went on at Katorga.

Also worth mentioning, the TMD (time manipulation device) is a great-looking prop. I kind of want to build a replica with lights and tubes and stuff.

Weapons

It's been a while since I played a first-person shooter with a really different assortment of weapons. There's a sniper rifle where you manually guide the bullet; a grenade launcher where you manually roll the bomb to its destination; a sniper rifle that can slow time for a moment to better allow you to line up your shots; and an explosive railgun with an infrared scope, as well as your standard pistol/assault rifle/shotgun/rocket launcher. The minigun is also fairly awesome.

Colour Palette

Singularity mostly takes place in dark, dank ruins, but you frequently get big splashes of blue and orange, with the colours varying between the time and the tech involved. The present is mostly dark and glowy-orange, helping emphasize the decay, while the past is brighter, cleaner, and glowy-blue. But those are just overall averages — there are plenty of exceptions and a few variations.

F.E.A.R. + Bioshock

Much as I hate labelling things, Singularity looks and plays like a mix between F.E.A.R. and Bioshock: a run-down old facility, but atmospherically much darker and scarier than Bioshock's Rapture. And since both of those games were very good, Singularity turns out very well. But it's not just a mashup of two different games — the time travel mechanic and plot are very effective at making this game stand out and feel like its own thing.

Endings

The game has three endings. When you get to the end it might seem as though there are only two options, but there is a third. One ending tends towards the more “evil” kind of video game ending, but with its own neat complications that arise. There's a “selfish” or “neutral” ending that's more ambiguous as to its morality. But here's what really got me: the “good” ending manages to throw in just a little bit of doubt as to whether it was the right thing to do. I can't say too much more without spoiling things, so I'll leave it at that.

The Neutral

Easy

I put this under neutral because it's not a bad thing for me, but you can decide for yourself. Singularity is pretty easy. I played on normal difficulty, as I always do. I only died once and always ran a surplus of health kits, energy packs, and ammo. I purchased more upgrades than I could actually equip, and maxed out multiple weapons. The difficulty especially breaks down when you find and upgrade the minigun, which is given to you as a standard weapon. At its height the minigun gets 100 rounds per magazine with 500 in reserve, and the damage upgrade combined with the accuracy upgrade mean it takes a maximum of four seconds of sustained fire to kill any non-boss, and you can do so from across the map.

I get the impression that the difficulty was scaled for the lower accuracy and response of a controller, and was not adjusted for the PC version.

The Bad

Poor Console Port

I started up the game and noticed it was at a low resolution by default. That's fine, I'll turn it up. Except the dropdown menu only went up to 1280x720 for me — a bit of research indicates that the game fails to recognize many non-standard laptop display resolutions, ie, anything between 720p and 1080p. I had to search out a fix, which was going into the Windows registry and editing two files for X and Y resolution. Follow the link for a Windows 7 fix: http://www.wuup.co.uk/singularity-resolution-tweak-w7 Additionally, the game's textures are only 720p, so if you run at a higher resolution, they start to look jagged and/or blurry. Antialiasing is not available at all on the PC version. Also, as mentioned above, the game is pretty easy.

Multiplayer

It had some neat ideas — the soldiers play in first-person while the mutants play in third-person, for example — but it wasn't different or varied enough to stand up for long. Which is probably why PC multiplayer is pretty much dead.

The Verdict

Recommendation: play it.

Yes, it's a linear FPS — but it often makes you feel as though it's not, or that you have more control than you really do. The plot is pretty awesome and brings up a lot of questions and implications about time travel morality and mechanics. The weapons are pretty unique. What more could you want from a first-person shooter?

The only thing I'd recommend is to consider on which platform you'll play. It's still $30 on Steam. Play it on the PC if you don't like shooters on the console, but otherwise it'd probably be better to get an XBox or PS3 copy — less bugs to worry about, and it might pose more of a challenge. If you're lucky you can probably find it for a fair bit cheaper than on Steam.