“Singularity”—first impressions - game review
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss
Categories:
Software Review
Tags:
review
games
fps
We got a copy of Activisions’s “Singularity” (developed by Raven) and started playing with it. It’s a FPS set on a island where the Russians built a research facility in the 1950s to test a newly discovered element E99. Things didn’t turn out quite the way the scientist had hoped and the Russians (Soviet Union at the time) shut down the research center and abandoned the island. Rediscovered by a satellite scan in 2010 a U.S. special ops force is sent in to investigate, find the E99 and well, I’m not sure what they are supposed to do with it yet.
As you progress through the game you pick up bigger better weapons and at a certain point (trying not to be a spoiler) you get a hand-arm mounted time manipulation device that lets you warp time—which is convenient for going back in time and straightening things out. Nate (the hero—you) now discovers the island is constantly shifting between 1955 and 2010.
The game was developed for the Xbox 360 and then re-ported to the PC and Playstation3. It uses the Unreal 3 engine and because it was targeted at the 360 originally it is only DirectX 9.0c—but, that’s good enough, in fact its fine. The graphics are good looking and maybe they don’t have the bump-map and lighting nuances afforded by newer versions of DirectX, but the game is well lit, has shadows and reflections, lots of bumps, and other than CG geeks like me, no one stops to admire the scenery in a FPS.
What do we think?
The game is fun. If you like FPSs you’ll like this. It feels a little like “Stalker” with the nuclear aspect and the subsequent mutants. It’s got interesting firepower like “Wolfenstien,” and lots of surprises like “FEAR” and others. I’m running it on an Nvidia 285 and the S3D came up perfectly. Although Nvidia hasn’t rated the game yet, it works, and looks good in stereo.
I highly recommend the game (so far) and think it’s going to give me and you many hours of fun and surprises.
