Gratuitous Cyrillic is bad, mkay? It can... | Singularity

Gratuitous Cyrillic is bad, mkay? It can be understandable if you put it in the title for style (though I still grimace at that), but you really shouldn't put it all throughout your game, to the point where you objectives are, "Fièd Katheÿiè aèd escape." Every time, through the entire game. It gets old really, really fast.

Now that that little grievance is out of the way, Singularity is fun. It's an interesting tale of the Butterfly Effect and the instability of time travel. The story itself isn't exactly groundbreaking, and some of the narration-particularly the end sequence, which talks for a minute or so and just sort of ends-is poor, but it gets the job done. You're an American military spec ops dude who goes to a Russian island for something they never really specify, and find the island was an old Soviet research facility for an element called E-99 that has time changing properties. ???? goes wrong real quick and you're sucked into the past, where you change history by accident, and come back to find a world run by a brutal dictator who was formerly one of the researchers on the island, which is now overrun by strange abhuman beasts. Now you gotta fix it. There's a sort of twist at the end, too, and while I didn't really see it coming it wasn't exactly M. Night Shyamalan levels of "holy ????." Still not a bad story by any means, but you really aren't playing Singularity for a riveting tale.

What you're playing for is the action. In a similar setup to Bioshock's plasmids, you acquire the TMD (Time Manipulation Device), which allows you to age/de-age objects and people as well as do some other neat ????, like telekinesis. There's really nothing quite like snatching an enemy RPG out of the air and throwing it back at him. You also have guns. You're honestly going to use the guns a lot more, but the TMD is very useful in interacting with the environment. There's a particular puzzle involving age-crushing a box that the developers really, really, really like. The TMD can one-shot human enemies, instantly aging them to mummies, and has various other effects on the time warped monsters throughout. It takes a lot of energy to do those, though, and while you're constantly swimming in ammo for both your guns and TMD, having to reload after every 2 agings when there's a billion dudes around kinda puts a damper on the useability. So you'll be using your guns a lot, which you can find "weapon tech" to upgrade and get larger magazines, faster reloading, and higher damage.

This is where the game makes its biggest mistake. It gives you the Autocannon. It's basically a minigun, and you get it maybe halfway through the game. This isn't a mistake in that it's a bad thing-in fact, quite the opposite. The autocannon is so good I almost only ever used it after getting it. For about half the entire game. It's useful against any enemy, it's high damage, high rate of fire, and the ammo is plenty. Towards the end of the game, **Mild Spoilers** you even get a TMD upgrade that eliminates the use of energy, allowing unlimited use of the TMD's aging attacks against the Russian hordes **/end spoilers** I still used the autocannon anyway. It's just that good, and you feel like a Terminator implacably advancing towards the enemy and cutting them down in a hail of gunfire. Especially with damage reduction and max health upgrades, you feel unstoppable. There's also the Seeker, an E-99 powered gun that lets you control the bullet mid-flight and is probably the coolest gun in any video game ever. Sadly, you don't get to keep it since switching weapons drops it and the ammo only appears in select areas, but it's always fun while it lasts.

Singularity is a good game. The story is feasible enought to provide a backdrop for the action, the gameplay is solid, and autocannon autocannon autocannon. Would recommend.˜˜˜˜˜˜˜ dle 10.6˜˜˜˜˜˜ ˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜