Let me give you an idea of what Singularity is like, it plays like Modern Warfare, from some of the weapons down to the speed of aiming down your sights, it feels like Bioshock, eerie, occasionally atmospheric and it’s just a bit heavy with the 1950’s vibe... when it’s in the 1950’s and it has overarching vibe of Dead Space, the monsters, the upgrade system. That’s not to say Singularity is a poor game, these are the guys who were responsible for 2009’s Wolfenstein so just take that into consideration.
The story takes places on Katorga-12 where Russians (yes I thought that too) are using an element called E99 for their evil experiments. You play Nate Renko (had to look that one up) a soldier sent to investigate the island to stop the Russians with Nolan North or something like that, you’re not going to get a compelling story here so leave your brain in the fridge. One character I do remember is Barisov, which in a thick Russian accent sounds an awful lot like Berezov, which got me exited for all the wrong reasons, you eventually encounter Barisov who reveals that some other dude wants to take over the world so you have to stop him, standard fare stuff, the game is however pro-audio log, the only down fall is you have to sit next to the audio log if you want to listen to it in its entirety and there are no subtitles, this is one area in the game I would have liked it if they would have blatantly ripped off Bioshock and just have a portrait of some dude whilst the audio log plays out.
During the course of Singularity you do manage to get some neat powers, LB is mapped to rapid aging and RB is mapped to rapid aging, depending on whether you want them to die of preconception or old age is entirely up to you, my issue though is the way they are incorporated into the combat, some enemies require certain time powers in order to stun them or phase them out of a time shift, there just isn’t much creativity involved. Firearms are what you’d expect, pistol, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, you’ve seen it all before, there are a few noteworthy weapons which are a lot of fun to play around with, my favourite being a grenade launcher where you can control the grenade with the left analog and detonate it upon release of the left trigger, there isn’t much experimentation to be had with the time travelling powers and the firearms in unison, most notably is using the RB to knock back monsters and shoot the glowing blue bits, like I say, nothing we haven’t seen before.
I do like the puzzle elements in Singularity, ever so slightly akin to Portal, using your gravitation lift you can move boxes, mash them down and recover their original form to open broken cargo doors, simple stuff but the first time I saw it in action I thought it was pretty neat. Like I mentioned earlier there is an upgrade system in place, using E99 you can purchase upgrades your character to adjust to your style, these include health bar upgrades, ADA... uh E99 upgrades along with some more specific and what I found to be useless power ups, upgrading oxygen underwater anyone? I didn’t manage to upgrade everything on my first playthrough but what I did upgrade got me through the game just fine.
Singularity is not a fantastic looking game, it’s not a bad looking game either, I never found any graphical glitches to mention other than forcing two boxes to expand in a tight space (the physics went mad with that one), of course I had to go out of my way to find that, the presentation in general is fantastic albeit ripped off other franchises, like I mentioned before, the HUD elements are straight up from Bioshock and Dead Space, some of the animations are too long winded, like the healing animation, in mid combat that is a bitch, to its credit though the game is littered with Russian accented yet English spoken awesome 1950s cartoons, the games main strength I found was the atmosphere, the score doesn’t drive the atmosphere in Singularity, the game world does, the sky in particular when you get the chance to see it looks pretty awesome, there are a few set pieces that stood out in the campaign, mainly the scripted use of the time manipulating abilities, they aren’t spectacular but they spaced out at an even pace to want you to see Singularity through to the end.
Singularity takes a lot of great ideas from a load franchises and meshes them together in a way that doesn’t hold together in a consistent manner throughout the span of its 6 - 8 campaign, that's not to say it's all that bad though, with strong ideological values buried somewhere in the story it never seemed to claw its way out of generic shooter territory, making it hard for me to recommend at full price, perhaps get it next year when the price has dropped because you might find something you’ll like in Singularity.