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Have you ever dreamed about wearing a gauntlet that would let you manipulate time and space, all while pumping bad dudes and monsters alike full of hot lead? Yeah, me neither, but you still should take a look at how Raven Software’s time traveling-themed  FPS turned out!

Raven Software’s Singularity is a game that has been a bit of a confusing experience for me. Not because the game is in any way especially complicated, but rather because its design varies so frequently between run-in-the-mill, mediocre gunplay to some genuinely inspired, even borderline brilliant moments. If I were to put my experience with Singularity on a graph, it would be quite erratic and inconsistent. That isn’t a big slam on Singularity as even at its lowest points, while things can get dull and somewhat routine, it’s never simply bad. This will require some explanation. Let’s take a closer look at this wacky multi-platform FPS.

 

You play as the U.S. military operative and our silent protagonist, Captain Renko who is sent to investigate radiation on the fictitious, supposedly abandoned Russian island named Katorga-12. After crash-landing on the island and immediately being tossed against flesh-eating humanoid creatures of unknown origin, you are quick to discover that the island was the test site for a new element discovered by the Soviet Union back in the 50s. This new element is simply called Element-99, or E99 for short. Unfortunately, and I’m sure no one saw this coming, it seems that these tests went horribly awry and the island has since had a bad 55 years. Renko quickly gets involved with various characters from a number of factions, one of which informs him that the fate of the world may hang upon his success. No pressure. It turns out E99 is capable of powering time travel, and you get ahold of a gauntlet contraption that can alter time with a simple press of a button. Ah, modern conveniences! This Time Manipulation Device (or TMD) shapes the storyline and is a key component to Singularity’s gameplay both in and out of combat.

 

Of course, at its core Singularity is a first-person shooter, and as far as simple shooting it sits in the camp of being on the wrong side of mediocre. Shooting feels all right, but lacks the polish of the cream of the crop in the FPS universe. Many guns lack the proper feel of recoil, the animations are outdated, and the sound effects lack a certain umph. Singularity compensates for this shortcoming in numerous ways, most of which revolve around the TMD and all of which are somehow linked to E99. For example, in combat you can use your TMD on soldiers to age them into oblivion (or in the case of some beasties, simply slow them to a crawl), drop a temporal bubble that will freeze human foes and slow nastier creatures, or even grab objects like exploding barrels via a very Half-Life 2-like anti-gravity attachment to hurl them at your hapless foes. These variations add some much-needed spice to Singularity’s general shooting, at least keeping the constant combat situations from becoming boring. Of course, you won’t have all of these abilities right from the start. Some, like the anti-gravity attachment, are acquired automatically as you progress through the game, but you can also upgrade your weapons and various other abilities at hubs you’ll find scattered throughout the world. You’ll find deposits of E99 littered about as you continue moving through Katorga-12, and these upgrade hubs are where you can use these deposits as currency to upgrade.

 

One thing that I noticed early was the incredible overlap between Singularity and Bioshock. The plot begins with an aircraft crashing onto what was hoped to be a island to usher in the future whose inhabitants have somehow mutated into mindless husks. The 50′s era propaganda that permeates the world from the very start coupled with audio logs that are inexplicably everywhere throughout this island takes the resemblance from cute to borderline shameless. Prior to getting the TMD, Singularity gives off a pretty bad impression, and one that I think could have been avoided with some effort. Fortunately, after acquiring the TMD combat is less of a chore as mentioned and puzzles open up to become more interesting. See, outside of combat the TMD can be used on specific objects in the environment to shift them between their state in 1955 before Katorga-12 went downhill and their usually-dilapidated state in the modern era of 2010. So you might zap a smashed crate with your TMD to restore it to its original state, grab it and position it with your anti-gravity device, jump on the crate to reach an unreachable platform, grab the crate and take it up after you, zap it to smash it again, slide it under a slightly-opened partition, and then zap it again to reform the crate and force the partition to open wider. It isn’t complicated, but it does feel terribly clever and it’s these moments when the time travel really clicks as a unique and well-used mechanic that Singularity achieves that sense of individuality that it often seems to lack. There’s shades of brilliance here, but unfortunately much of the game is mired in a gray mediocrity.

 

Of course, that’s appropriate considering that Singularity falls into the line of games going for the “realistic” art design of all gray and brown all the time. That isn’t entirely true of course (the TMD powers look great), but Singularity does utilize a washed-out color palette to present the often dilapidated environments of Katorga-12. It fits and does the game well for the most part, but this is a trend that I would not weep to see die down a bit. With that said, Singularity’s visuals are hardly its strong point. The character models are rendered fairly well but generally lifeless, while many textures in the environments are just flat-out ugly if you stroll up on them and take a close look. Considering that FPS titles are some of the most aesthetically advanced genres out there, it’s easy to take notice of how outdated Singularity’s visuals are in comparison to the big dogs out there. Singularity’s music is fitting if somewhat unmemorable, while the sound effects manage to accurately represent everything happening on-screen without standing out. In general, I felt the sound effects for the guns were particularly lacking considering how often you’ll be using them. The voice acting is actually quite good overall, though, as you’d expect there are some underachievers and oddball lines here and there. Some of the dialogue is campy or (often) melodramatic, but hey, Singularity itself is campy in premise and seems at least somewhat self-aware.

It seems that a FPS can’t ship these days without multiplayer and Singularity is no exception. Unfortunately, Singularity is rather underwhelming in this category. You play in teams of three, with three playing as human soldiers utilizing TMDs and three playing as mutated abominations from Katorga-12. Each side has access to four unique classes, which I certainly appreciate, but that’s where the pros stop for me. Perhaps it’s a problem on my end, but I found it difficult to find matches and in addition, the multiplayer modes are lacking in variation compared to other more multiplayer-focused shooters. Add to that the issue that shooting in Singularity, while capable enough, isn’t particularly engaging and you have a recipe for a lackluster multiplayer mode. Personally, I would have liked Raven to take the time used on the multiplayer to refine the single-player experience, but hey, multiplayer sells.

 

I’ll give it to you straight:  Singularity has problems. Basic gun combat lacks the visceral feel of top-tier titles, the visuals are aging, and multiplayer lacks variation and polish. On the other hand, while it seems to have a bit of an identity crisis, Singularity also has some really great ideas. The time travel mechanic is used to spice up both combat and exploration and makes for novel events within the story itself. Time travel is just fun, and Singularity does a good job putting it into form within an FPS. Now if only Raven Software would use that TMD to go back about a year and correct these issues, perhaps I would be giving an exclusively glowing review. Alas, until the timeline is altered, Singularity is a fundamentally solid if unremarkable shooter that shines with a few strokes of brilliance yet is marred by an equal number of blunders.

 

STORY:	7.5
GRAPHICS & DESIGN:	7
SOUND:	7.5
GAMEPLAY:	7.5
FUNFACTOR/TILT:	8
OVERALL SCORE:	7.5/10

-Andrew Glasco