Buy Singularity

I recall checking this out briefly back when it was released but never really gave it a chance, something I obviously should have given the positive experience I've had with the game recently.

Singularity was released during an era which had very much forgotten about the PC, extremely poor ports and lack of options dominated the landscape, and you were lucky if you even had a decent FOV on the PC. Speaking of Field of view, during this era many titles including Cod (starting with MW2) had horrendous FOV to the point where you wondered if the devs even booted the game on a PC before shipping.

Luckily and to my surprise, even tho the game does lack options, Singularity is very playable out of the box and the FOV isn't set at 55. My biggest gripe with options is that the mouse-sensitivity does little to nothing, it is way oversensitive and so you'll do best adjusting this outside of the game to get a better feel with more reasonable movement.

How is it then? Well the story is actually really great and engaging, and I would say that this game should definitely be played to enjoy the atmosphere, lore and appreciate what is going on by reading the notes, looking at the environment, watching videos, projections and so on.

It's in these moments that Singularity really shines, and it's pacing is surprisingly good on several occasions throughout the campaign. Thanks to that you get a sense of suspense and buildup multiple times which is great, but unfortunately it does have a some of these shooting-galleries from time to time which for me just breaks all sorts of creepy immersion. Some are more warranted than others, but overall the gallery shootouts with humans are the lows.

The world detail, textures, sound and ambience is quite good, but it does suffer a lot from uneven quality at times. Raven has a long history of developing for ID-tech (wolf, quake etc) but this game was built using UE3 and that's unfortunate for several reasons.

One thing that is often overlooked by UE-devs even to this day is how basic collision is handled with props in the world. There is no smooth transition and if you step on things your height is instantly elevated making for very unsmooth gameplay at times, especially when you're exploring. This can even be seen in modern UE-titles as well, and it's baffling to me how more people ain't reacting to such immersion breaking moments that ID handled in engine code decades ago.

I must however credit the animations, the guns and everything have very smooth and methodical animations unlike a lot of spastic shooters of today and yesterday, but it does lack in feedback when actually shooting and the same can be said for the gun-sounds which are quite underwhelming to say the least. Credit to the death animations as they often play out as if the monster or human are wounded, and they might even do an extra leap or crawl which kinda makes you question if you really killed them from time to time, a great touch. That combined with actual bullet impacts on the enemies and dismemberment adds to the immersion and realism.

The overall voice acting is quite decent and if you meet the game on its own terms and play for immersion it's a good game and quite a unique one even to this day. It was clearly setup for sequels or additional DLC, and it's a real shame we didn't get any.

Without even looking I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a commercial success, and that's sad, this game sits in an era where we still had very different experiences and settings coming out of AAA-developers/budgets for the fps-genre.