First Person Saturday - Singularity

A frequent comparison made with Singularity is Irational Games' Bioshock, and it's easy to see why. The game stars a silent protagonist in a strange, 60's inspired world, where you must gather the story from audio logs. However, I'd liken it more to Bulletstorm. Singularity's a modern first person shooter that does everything right  The game's pacing is done right, the story is done right, the difficulty is done right, and the game's main gimmick, the Time Manipulation Device, is almost enough to sell the game alone.

The Time Manipulation Device is easily the coolest part of Singularity, coming with a lot of useful gimmicks. It can age or renew almost everything you can interact with, cover included, and even speed up an enemy soldier's aging process until he crumples into dust. The TMD also has other powers, such as the ability to pick up and move objects like the gravity gun, transform humans into feral beasts, or stop time in certain spheres, allowing you to line up accurate hits on enemies. Each of the gimmicks works great for combat, and can go perfectly in tandem with Singularity's many weapons.

Singularity's arsenal is pretty great as well, although it's a shame you are limited to two weapons. There are rail guns, autocannons, grenade launchers with controllable grenades, automatic shotguns, and even my personal favorite, a sniper rifle with an explosive bullet you can control in 3rd person. Awesome. Each weapon is satisfying to shoot and handle, and the over the top blood effects are certainly welcome in a game like this.

The story is truly wonderful, taking you through an alternate history where a powerful Russian scientist has seized control of the world, with you being credited as the one who saved him. The story may seem a tad predictable at first, but it does have some clever twists. Things really heat up with the three available endings, which are bad, really bad, and downright awful when it comes to 'happy endings'.

Singularity has a very well balanced difficulty, being just hard enough for newbies to the FPS genre and the harder difficulties managed to even make me suffer a few deaths. The game often throws you against a gauntlet of enemies, all of which are a blast to take out. Running through room after room, clearing out areas with a few well placed shots from the automatic shotgun is a blast, although bosses boil down to nothing more than shooting the biggest, most glowing part of their body.

Most importantly however? Singularity's fun. It's really fun. There are times when you can be just blasting through enemies with your shotgun and atomizing them with your TMD, and then before you know it, a large chunk of Singularity is done. While it's short, I consider nearly every moment near the end to be worthwhile. See, this is where the Bulletstorm comparison comes back. Sure, it may be short, and sure, it may rely on modern FPS cliches too much, but Singularity's just so much fun that I can't bother to care.