We'll Set The World Right, Eventually

I beat Singularity earlier this week. I was going to say it's the first first-person shooter I'd played in over 2 years. Then I remembered I beat Rage last fall. So Singularity is the first FPS I enjoyed playing in a long time. Over 5 years, probably.

The gist of the story is a man name Ranko is sent as part of a team to investigate some strange happenings on the island of Katorga-12. While wandering the ruins after a helicopter crash, he's hit by a wave of energy, and suddenly everything is burning. He saves a man about to fall, another wave hits, and everything's as it was before. Almost. Soon enough, Ranko and his partner are captured by Soviet - not Russian - soldiers, commanded by the very man you saved, a Dr. Demichev. He's quite surprised to see you here, not looking a day older than you did when you saved him, over 50 years ago.

Yes, you altered the past, and after being rescued by a group called MIR-12 (who I picture hiding out in a rapidly decaying space station), you're clued in that by saving Demichev, you brought about the death of another scientist named Barisov, and Demichev used an element known as E-99 to build a bomb which destroyed the East Coast of the U.S. Then the whole world basically capitulated, Demichev gained power, and was eventually able to overthrow Khrushchev. Stalin would never have let that happen.

MIR-12 knows Barisov was working on a time manipulation device (TMD), and they want you to find it, use it, and fix things. Which you try very hard to do. You save Barisov, meaning he's alive to guide you when you return to the present, but that still doesn't fix things. Throughout all this, you're fighting not just Soviet soldiers - be it ones from the '50s or the present - but also the mutated results of Demichev's experimentation on the people who populated the research facility on Katorga-12. He wanted to see what would happen if people ingested E-99 regularly with their food. The answer is not so good for you.

The good news is, you have the TMD, and it can do all sorts of things. You can catch projectiles hurled at you and redirect them (larger ones, like grenades, and explosive barrels. Not bullets). You can age things forward or backwards, to rebuild a collapsed staircase or bring back a box with potentially useful items inside. You can age people, too. You can create a ball of temporal energy which slows everything within it except you. There's even an Impulse function, which is basically a wide-beam repulsor ray. Not sure why it would have that. I think it would have been better if it caused the things it affected to return to the location they occupied a few seconds earlier, since that could serve the same purpose: to get you a little breathing space. Whatever, it's handy either way.

I think one of the reasons I grew disenchanted with FPS was the increased emphasis on tactical sense. Where you had to use cover and flanking, and all that stuff. I can see that being fun if you're playing with a friend you can coordinate with, but on my own, or relying on computer A.I. - which doesn't come up here, I'm speaking generally - not so much. Singularity doesn't overload on that. You have to exercise some common sense, especially against soldiers. Get behind cover, prioritize, stuff like that. But it doesn't cross that line where it starts to be too much work to be worth the trouble. Maybe having the TMD helps. All the tricks it gives you can greatly simplify things. If you remember to use it. I didn't a lot of times, though I got better near the end, when having enough energy for it wasn't such a concern.

I don't like that you can only carry two weapons. There are lockers scattered around where you can switch between weapons, buy ammo, upgrade the guns, but at the end of the day, you have to pick two. You can swap one out for something you find on the ground if you'd like, whatever you drop will still be in the locker the next time. It's one of those Goldeneye remnants. In that game, you could carry as many guns as you could find, and I loved the variety. This isn't a gripe exclusive to Singularity, though. Dark Sector and The Saboteur do the same thing. I assume it's some greater emphasis on realism, though I don't know what business that has in a game where I have to use a minigun to kill a bug large enough to destroy a train trestle.

The game has a decently creepy atmosphere. Not on par with Silent Hill 2, but moreso than Resident Evil 4. Katorga-12 is a rotting corpse of a facility, with broken windows, crumbling walls, corpses and wreckage strewn everywhere. A lot of the game takes place at night, with nothing but barely going lightbulbs, fires, or the moon for lighting. Occasionally the game employs the "indistinct whispers", where you hear someone talking, but you can't make it out, or determine where it's coming from. That always puts me on edge. Especially when I also see one of the mutations perched on a ledge, before it teleports away. Are they communicating with each other? Is it the wind? Is it ghosts, or some temporal echo?

There are old tape recorders you can de-age and listen to. They can be useful, or just depressing, either because the person is full of hope, or because they've grown resigned to their fate. There are also messages on the walls sometimes. You have to de-age those to see them, but what's bad is that as the game progresses, it becomes abundantly clear they're directed to Ranko, specifically.

The game offers three different endings. It's more like Echo Night Beyond, where which ending you get depends solely on a particular choice you make at the end, as opposed to Silent Hill 2, where the ending is the culmination of how you played the entire game. Unlike EHB, Singularity has an ending they definitely consider the "right" one. I'm not convinced, but I wasn't a fan of any of the endings. I mean, I like the decision I made the first time, but afterward, the game tells you what the fallout is, and they also hint at what Ranko gets up to. It didn't jibe with my picture of what he'd do at all. To be fair, I figured he would do pretty much what I would do. On the other hand, it isn't as though the game offered any insights into his personality that would suggest he wouldn't act like me.

Sometimes it's hard to stick the landing. That aside, I loved Singularity. If I didn't have so many other games I need to finish (or start), I'd definitely play through it again. I'd like to see if I could do better at incorporating the TMD into fights, rather than using it mostly in the quiet moments.