5/16/06 2:51 PM
"Sin Episodes: Emergence"
Last year was the year of Half-Life 2. Every gamer had played through the entire experience and was left longing for more. Until recently I had only heard really vague rumors about the Half-Life Episodes coming out. What I had heard about was Sin showing up at some point. Not that I ever really played the old Sin game, but damnit, I need something to do with Half-Life.
After Xfire, somehow, picked up on my interest and downloaded the trailer for me and promptly started playing it. Ignoring the fact that it crashed Oblivion, seeing as that happens every 20 minutes anyway, I sat through the movie. The game looked deep and involving, meaning it looked like it had lifted almost everything from Half-Life. I didn't really care, I needed a fix.
If you've ever seen a trailer for a really bad movie after seeing said film and thought to yourself, "I didn't know there was that many good scenes in that movie" you know how I feel. Sin is exactly of like that, just replace "bad movie" with "attempt at entertainment" and "many good scenes" with "much plot". It is kind of like watching G4/TechTV, you know these are things that you could be enjoying but for some reason you decide to watch anything else.
I told myself for the first half of the game, all 2 hours, that the reason I wasn't getting into the it as much as I should have is because my graphics card made the game look nothing like the trailer. Then I watched the movie again and realized not only did the game looked exactly the same, but I had already (in two hours) seen all of the plot points shown.
Limited is probably the best word I could come up with at this point to describe the entire experience. Three weapons total, 5 types of enemies, 4ish hours of gameplay, 3 "boss" battles. The game takes you buy the hand to show you how empty it is. I have been told by several people this is because it is only part one of 9 in a series. Great, 1/9th of a finished game and expect people to pay 200 dollars for a game that normally would have cost us 50 and still not been impressive. Here is an idea, if you are going to sell a game in episodes maybe you should make the first one worth playing through.
Visually the game is boring. It is kind like watching your friend's college art school movie were they stand in a corner and bark for two hours and then eat some kind of green slime. You don't know if you should be sad for them, or if you should applaud because no one else is. If you striped everything interesting from Half-Life 2 and then placed the entire game within 8 feet of where you start it, you kind of get the idea. Add to that the same enemies attacking wave after wave and you get the idea.
What interests me the most is that the game felt the need to drop five scientists into the labs that you walk through for 1/2 the game. Clearly these are the most brilliant minds in the world working here. There are 200 floors filled with labs just for them to do research on, and they all hang out in one corner of one lab. I took great pleasure in killing these scientists off. Clearly they are either too smart to live, or underpaid to the point that I am doing them a favor.
It is kind of odd that there are several thousand security guards, all of whom always know the material they can shoot you through, can see through said material, and all have perfect aim. Please note that even when hiding around a cement wall, unable to see your enemy, that they know exactly where to throw a grenade to take you out with maxium force.
At several points the game tosses your side kick, whatever her name is, in with you. I know this was originally planned as some kind of escort mission where you had to make sure she lived, simply because the mere thought of that makes me insanely annoyed. For that I am going to blame them regardless if it is true. I guess they figured out that the A.I. in the game was terrible, and your side kick never fires her gun. So instead of putting effort into the game to fix it, they just decided to make her invincible. Good work on that, now I have a lump of pixels that complains when I shoot it.
Was the game a complete waste of my time? Eh. It started out good, and then it started throwing dozens of the same exact enemy at me, none of which where hard to kill. Every enemy in the game has the same tactics built in, "rush blindly at target". Everything is constantly running directly at you, never seeking cover. The only "hard" part of the game is when you have to reload. Being zerg rushed by 30 enemies at a time while reloading make you die rather quickly. I would have to try an area several times until I remembered that I had grenades, and then promptly moved on to the next area.
If you can't wait until June 1st for the next "Half-Life" game to come out, and need something to make the addiction subside for a bit, play this game. If you can wait 15 days don't even consider it. I showed you the real life models, just be happy and move on.