For some reason, Yahtzee completely fails to mention that the game is ludicrously fun. The weapons and shooting mechanics are excellent, great weapons and great enemies (both humans and monsters). It's the best shooter I've played this year. And the gameplay mechanics, weapons, enemies, puzzles etc change every few minutes, it's got constant crazy variety, just like the Half-Life games.
The game does get a bit too easy if you fully upgrade assault rifle damage or your Deadlock time freezing power. But other than that flaw, it was a great old-skool shooter, with none of the problems of Wolfenstein. You know that Black Mesa mod that is supposed to be a modern remake of Half-Life 1? Singularity felt like what Half-Life 1 would be like if made with modern technology and set in Russia rather than the US, and about rifts in time rather than a rift to another universe. Not terribly original, but great in terms of setting and gameplay.
As for the "plot twist", it was not that saving Demechev changed history. Yes there's a brief flashback moment where it shows you saving the guy and history changing, but that's just to add emphasis to something. There are several real plot twists... which I wont' reveal in case anyone does get this game.
As a whole, the story was pretty decent. A hell of a lot beter than a lot of other time travel games and movies and TV shows.
Also, the thing where de-aging people turns them into mutants? Yahtzee thinks this makes no sense, and reckons it should turn them into babies. Think about it... when you age an enemy, you don't simply speed up time, you don't see the guy going about the next 50 years of normal day-to-day life, instead instead all the matter just gets incredibly old, and the person screams in horror as their flesh ages and disintegrates and their skeleton collapses to the floor. A diagram on a chalkboard in the game describes it as "increase in entropic radiation", entropy being the law of the universe that means things tend to get old and fall apart. So if you reverse the process, you are making their flesh incredibly young... like an embyo or fetus. Due to conservation of mass, they don't shrink into little babies, instead you get a man-sized embyonic thing, a blind creature with no skin. The original concept art on the Raven developer blog showed the thing being in a placental sac. http://www.ravensoft.com/blog/images/2010-06-07-ryanbutts/char_soldier_tmdstates.jpg I think they dropped that because they didn't want to emphasise the whole embyo thing, in case it was controversial and people complained or something.
What I also thought was cool was that the term Black Hole is never used in the game, even though a Singularity is the term for the core of a black hole. Which makes sense because the term wasn't invented until 1967, and in the game's story the Russians made an artificial one in the 1950s.
The game does get a bit too easy if you fully upgrade assault rifle damage or your Deadlock time freezing power. But other than that flaw, it was a great old-skool shooter, with none of the problems of Wolfenstein. You know that Black Mesa mod that is supposed to be a modern remake of Half-Life 1? Singularity felt like what Half-Life 1 would be like if made with modern technology and set in Russia rather than the US, and about rifts in time rather than a rift to another universe. Not terribly original, but great in terms of setting and gameplay.
As for the "plot twist", it was not that saving Demechev changed history. Yes there's a brief flashback moment where it shows you saving the guy and history changing, but that's just to add emphasis to something. There are several real plot twists... which I wont' reveal in case anyone does get this game.
As a whole, the story was pretty decent. A hell of a lot beter than a lot of other time travel games and movies and TV shows.
Also, the thing where de-aging people turns them into mutants? Yahtzee thinks this makes no sense, and reckons it should turn them into babies. Think about it... when you age an enemy, you don't simply speed up time, you don't see the guy going about the next 50 years of normal day-to-day life, instead instead all the matter just gets incredibly old, and the person screams in horror as their flesh ages and disintegrates and their skeleton collapses to the floor. A diagram on a chalkboard in the game describes it as "increase in entropic radiation", entropy being the law of the universe that means things tend to get old and fall apart. So if you reverse the process, you are making their flesh incredibly young... like an embyo or fetus. Due to conservation of mass, they don't shrink into little babies, instead you get a man-sized embyonic thing, a blind creature with no skin. The original concept art on the Raven developer blog showed the thing being in a placental sac. http://www.ravensoft.com/blog/images/2010-06-07-ryanbutts/char_soldier_tmdstates.jpg I think they dropped that because they didn't want to emphasise the whole embyo thing, in case it was controversial and people complained or something.
Because the Russians discovered E99 and experimented with it in 1940s and 50s, before the discovery of Einsteinium. It was the 99th element to be discovered, so they called it E99. And since things went bad and everything was covered up, the rest of the world never found out about it, so later the "real" 99th element Einsteinium was discovered.lordwally said:
What I also thought was cool was that the term Black Hole is never used in the game, even though a Singularity is the term for the core of a black hole. Which makes sense because the term wasn't invented until 1967, and in the game's story the Russians made an artificial one in the 1950s.
