Lost in the nebulous space between the soulless flair of the modern military shooter and the heartfelt kitsch of the retro “classic” shooter, the shooters of the late 2000s and early 2010s were inspired in equal measures by the all-encompassing pop-fervor of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the deteriorated foundation build by the likes of Doom and Quake. Spurred by the overwhelming presence of Infinity Ward’s absurdly influential franchise, alongside a legion of like-minded contemporaries, Activision sought out a greedy double-dip. As one of their franchises altered the landscape of first-person shooters, the company dug into the established market with a new project cobbled together with the essence of their largest releases, a faceless, amorphous summer blockbuster with the capitalistic purpose of scoring big returns on a low investment. With emotion and heart out the door, and with eye’s on the dollar, Activision tasked Raven Software, longtime icons of the first-person shooter genre, with concocting this husk of a game. Unfortunately for Activision, their wishes for a quick-and-easy turnaround crashed headlong into the creative might of an exemplar of the industry. Budgets ebbed and flowed, deadlines came and went, and the tumultuous project underwent a lengthy stay in development hell.

The shambling corpse, a patchwork of Bioshock, Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R., and everyone’s favorite yearly jingoist genocide simulator, languished in limbo for years under the overbearing boot of Activision until the dawn of the 2010s. Finally free from the eternal prison of middle-management and executive meddling, Singularity sprung forth, bearing the influence of its progenitors on it’s sleeve. Alas, as the game rose to life, so too did it sign a death sentence for Raven Software, now a prisoner to the Call of Duty mines. With its wretched history behind it, and a decade after the fact, how does it hold up under scrutiny?

It’s uh… It’s mid. Maybe it’s the whole “copy the middle points of a hundred other games” thing, maybe it’s the complete lack of personality present, or perhaps it’s the feel of a weary dev team trying their hardest to make anything out of the nothing they’ve been handed. It’s a multi-million dollar project informed not by its own original ideas, but by the constant struggle to do anything original with the ideas it was made to encompass. Fuse that obvious discontent with a development cycle that could charitably be called trouble, and it’s no wonder the game came out in such a half-baked, malformed state. It should say something that the high point of the game was a Russian scientist claiming the way to prevent this broken timeline was very LowTierGod-ian, a succinct “you should kill yourself…now!”. As the game lays broken and rightfully forgotten to the sands of time, I’m drawn not to the game itself, but what it represents. To put it clearly, Singularity is the embodiment of the soullessness, the abject emptiness inherent to triple-A game development.

While not itself guilty of the crimes it represents, the game is a sacrifice to the altar of auteur theory, prestige media, and big-screen hollowness. It’s a game defined not by what it does, but what it’s corporate malefactors did to it in the name of creating a product for the mass market. Singularity breaths deep the fumes of Hollywood action cinema, and hacks out a dull, lifeless imitation. Resting inside the game there’s the shell of something wonderful, a grindhouse alternative history shooting gallery, and during succinct moments that beauty shines through, particularly in some of the truly inspired tools granted to the player to expense with wave-after-wave of Russian soldiers and mutated radiological monstrosities, but surrounding every second of that perfection is a curtain sewn with the express point of snuffing out whatever original light shines from within. Short and simple, it’s a game that, with more time, more care, more love, could have been something special: not influential or astounding, but more than the mediocre slog it devolved into.