 Review By: Nick Arvites |
Developer: | Ritual Entertainment |
| Publisher: | Valve (via Steam) / Electronic Arts (retail) | |
| Genre: | FPS | |
| ESRB: | Mature | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | Yes | |
| Accessories: | N/A |
In some strange alternate timeline, Valve never would release Half-Life in 1998. Without the monolithic first-person-shooter changing the way gamers think of the genre, a new FPS could have emerged as the genre-altering champion instead. SiN, a promising FPS, was that title. Sadly, the real world was much different. Rushed to release, SiN contained numerous bugs that marred the gameplay experience and had the unfortunate timing of releasing a few weeks before Half-Life. Ironically, the SiN universe is revisited by Ritual Entertainment through Half-Life developer Valve’s Steam service. Using the Steam client as a distribution source, Ritual is working on episodic content scheduled for release every six months. SiN Episodes: Emergence is the first title in the series, and starts off the re-visitation of the SiN universe with an explosion.
To many, the SiN Episodes series is first test of Valve’s promise of episodic content via Steam. For those not in the know, episodic content generally consists of stand-alone games that can be finished in about six hours priced relatively cheaply. SiN Episodes: Emergence is the first installment in the series and is priced at $19.99 over Valve’s Steam service or at retail. While the price of admission is low, the combined short gameplay and narrative flaws fail to separate SiN Episodes: Emergence from the pack and prevent this title from being one of the best bargains of the year.
SiN Episodes: Emergence seems like a standard shooter on the surface. However, the game grabs your eyes from the opening scene and takes full advantage of the Source engine, by which I mean gives you a shot of the female antagonist staring down at you practically dumping out of her shirt in a manner that would make Dead or Alive fans jealous. In fact, if you don’t really like female characters wearing tight leather and having disproportional bodies, this game may just annoy you since it likes to rub your face in it. All boob jokes aside, the Source engine is perhaps the reigning champion in making a game look excellent while performing perfectly well on even medium to low-end systems. I experienced no noticeable slowdowns, even with a ton of action on the screen.
If you like your shooters to have a ton of weapons, SiN Episodes: Emergence is not in your ballpark. This game features a whopping three (3) weapons. Yes, in an age where many shooters have flooded games with similarly useless weapons, SiN breaks the mold by only offering a Pistol, Shotgun, and Assault Rifle. Each has their uses, and some are better in certain situations than others. The pistol, for example, is extremely accurate and can kill almost instantly with a headshot. The shotgun is the close-range weapon of choice and its secondary fire is great for hitting a ton of close enemies at once. The Assault Rifle is designed to be used when you absolutely positively need to kill every last person in the room. It’s not quite as good as the typical chain-gun, but it behaves as a cross between Half-Life 2’s Assault Rifle and a Sniper Rifle. The zoom is nice, but I didn’t even notice it for the longest time because I was using my pistol to get headshots from a distance. The interesting thing is you never really miss any other weapons. The three they provide in the game allow you enough freedom and choices to make the game manageable. Grenades are especially useful, especially with the lack of any sort of BFG-styled guns. The enemy AI can provide for interesting situations. They won’t start shooting until they see you, so while they will pop out when you hit a certain point in the level, if you can duck out of sight quick enough you won’t get instantly swarmed and mowed down. There are only 6 types of enemies in the game: Lab soldiers, regular soldiers, Chaingun soldiers, mutants (think zombies similar to the ones in Half-Life or Halo), more mutants, and a huge tank-looking mutant you fight a few times. There is also a final boss, which was by far the hardest fight in the game.
The difficulty of the game depends on your style of play. SiN Episodes: Emergence boasts of a scaling difficulty level, where the AI will adjust based on your playing abilities, similar to the one present in the Max Payne series. However, I found this difficulty setting far too forgiving and, like Max Payne, flew through the game. In fact, the only spot I was really stuck on was the final boss fight, which is by far one of the hardest ones in a shooter I’ve experienced in years. The game also logs your statistics, and creates a graph detailing your various skills and weaknesses. It keeps track of which weapons you like, how many headshots, and other combat statistics of that nature. To make it more interesting, SiN Episodes: Emergence can send data on player’s game-choices to Ritual. The information gathered is used to improve future games in the series. While Ritual indicated that there were multiple ways to approach levels (akin to the original Deus Ex on PC), I did not find any. Quite to the contrary, the game style is the standard run-into-the-room-and-shoot-everything-that-moves cliché. While SiN Episodes: Emergence is good at what it does as a shooter, I went into the game expecting an experience more akin to Deus Ex or the first two Thief games.
Posted: 2006-07-16 11:22:47 PST