Singularity Review
Good pacing and an interesting story is enough to keep shooter fans happy despite some presentation issues.
The multiplayer in Singularity lets you to play as the creatures whom you fought against throughout the campaign. You can play as the mutated Reverts and vomit over Russian soldiers or heal your mutant buddies. The phase tick can crawl up walls (think Alien) and can take control of lonesome enemies. Even as the Zek you can conjure explosive barrels from another dimension and hurl them at groups using regenerating energy. They can move out of phase to avoid bullets then move in close for some melee kills. The humans have opposing classes allowing you to teleport short distances, heal or use impulse shockwaves.
All the crazy action happens around the beacons in Extermination
Although playing as the creatures is a fun twist the limited number of modes and presentation deficiencies bring down the experience. Apart from basic creatures vs humans mode (deathmatch) you only have Extermination. In Extermination the humans move forward and renew beacons then defend them for a short time. Mutants defend and destroy the beacons and once three have been renewed the humans win. If you have a capable offensive team with a few healers you can usually overcome any of the defenders without trouble and rounds are over quickly bringing you back in the lobby ready to try again.
The game doesn’t use dedicated servers and there was considerable delay between shooting and killing during all games. Pings listed on the score list did not seem representative of the experience I was having throughout matches. Even movement feels at the mercy of your connection with reduced correlation between what you see and what is happening. The whole presentation quality feels more like user made mod for the UE3 engine than a portion of a full blown retail game. Perhaps the real killer though is the lack of players, making it hard to get into a game. Extermination is the most popular mode with barely anybody playing deathmatch.
Head to the tower with the huge beam of energy, it's safer there!
Singularity is a decent single player shooter even if it sometimes questionably emulates similar games like BioShock. The game keeps a steady pace with enough variety improving over the tedious backtracking seen in Wolfenstein. The combat is fairly consistent but has plenty of room for improvement and the puzzles are far too simple to be memorable. None of the NPCs will look at you during cut scenes and there are major problems with the texture streaming. There is no save system, relying on sparsely placed checkpoints and doors conveniently close behind you too often. After finishing there is no way to go back and repeat better sections, assuming you even wanted to, without restarting a game. The story is minimal but effective enough and actually one of its better features, the game is resolved when the credits have rolled. Multiplayer feels tacked on and something destined to be quickly forgotten on the PC. Singularity will no doubt appease fans that can’t get enough shooters but it will not help those already growing tired of the genre.
Our ratings for Singularity on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: AMD Phenom II 955 @ 3.2GHz
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB
RAM: 4GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB
RAM: 4GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
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