At first, it looks like a modern shooter with different guns and weird creatures and…Nolan North, but after a while it shows itself to be more of a Wolfenstein but with Russians. Then a Half Life and to be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about any of that but the idea has to do with time travel and being able to age and deage stuff. I've seen people say that it's not as good as it could be and it's really not but color me impressed when I saw that you could age a crate to make it all smushed, put it under a cracked open door and then de-age it to puff it up, prying the door open enough to crawl under. Like, tell me that's not cool.

But like the games I said, they explore these types of things a little more (aside from maybe the newer Wolfenstein games) but what's there is definitely fun to see and after this mechanic was introduced, it only seemed to get better.

You find a new element on the periodic table called E99 which you use to upgrade your tool and weapons and health so it's fun to collect. You also find weapon upgrades and blueprints so you can really fine tune it.

This is the Pc version and for some reason, sometimes it'll shoot more than I mean so say a shotgun will shoot twice instead of once, but it's not a big issue. I played it on normal and after the opening hours, ammo wasn't really as scarce.

It does have a thing or two to learn about storytelling though. The amount of times I heard the names Demichev and Barisov, that'd be the plot, it didn't have subtitles so it was a lot of mumbo jumbo most of the time. The beginning introduces you to this Demichev but that's about it, they talk about what a dystopia he's wrought but they barely show the guy doing it. You're expected to just wait until the end for a less than stellar battle and stupid reveal.

Kathryn is one of the reasons I started liking the game, she's a little like Alyx but she dies. I spoiled it for you, yes but the way I just explained it has about the same effect as it did in the story. It's an off-screen death after various time messages written on the wall warning you that it's going to happen and how it happens is-

You reverse the time on this boat to bring it back up and running long enough to get something off of it (as something of that mass will revert after so long) so there's this really cool segment of you escaping a ship that's falling apart around you and you're just about out but over the radio, Kathryn says that that's it, she's going in to get it. I was less than a minute before I got out and Barisov's there like "Yeah, she's gone but we can't let her death be in vain"…like never to be mentioned again, no sendoff, just written out of the story. That is until the ending, which I'll get to.

They give you an end game type ability where you can infinitely blast your impulse. It's kind of OP, I get it but I think if they were going to do that, they could've done better. You know how in Metroid, you upgrade your cannon to go through walls and in Super have this super duper blaster and in Dread just an annihilator. It should've been more like that than "infinite ammo", I like the color change from orange to blue but there's no visual difference other than that, it's not more powerful, just more, it doesn't even reach farther.

'Singularity' as in, the singular game this will have. There are 4 different endings and the main one's last line is literally- "Ha, what'd I tell you, there's never anything interesting here, right comrade." not a one of those endings is good or satisfying and just feels lazily pasted.

One of the common threads is that Kathryn appears alive in the literal last cutscene but in the past, writing the journal that started this whole journey…so many ways they could've set that up, so much there that I liked and was almost special just squandered in that last quarter, it didn't pay off. The way her death was handled actively ruined the game for me even if the story was already shaky from the start with the E99 bomb nonsense.

Reviewed on Mar 19, 2024


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