SiN Episodes: Emergence

I didn't want to like this game because I thought, fnah, it's just FEAR but with crappy retro graphics. And it is, to a point, but it's a hell of a lot of fun nonetheless. It's good to find a classic balls to the wall kill everything frag fest in these days of super graphically intense baddies that can only attack one at a time because the GPU will fall over if two of them appear at once.

I would have liked more done with the graphics, hell a lot more in that regard, it looks like the last two years just happened to other people, but it's a lot of fun too. That said I'd probably not be able to sit through 18 hours of it as is, even if it is served up in bi-monthly chunks.

Also WTF is wrong with that Sin bint's bewbies? They wobble in a most unnatural, watery fashion. It's quite disconcerting and not remotely pleasing to the eye. The guy that animates that model needs to spend some quality time with a Dead or Alive game to get the movement right.

 

Oh I dunno, I rather like Elexis' boobs. Seeing her in a thong was rather tasty. She's a pretty hot baddie.

 

Annoying thing with hot baddies is that unless there are hordes of them like in Return To Castle Wolfenstein you generally don't get to give them a good killing as you would with a generic bloke/robot/cyborg/alien baddy.

 

grenades + headshots with assault rifle, or secondary fire with shottie/pistol

as for the weapons, when i first realised there were only 3 i was kinda pissed but then i realised how many games were you have 300 weapons to chose from do you actually use more than a couple?
take hl2 for example throughout the whole game i basically used the pistol, shotgun and the pulse rifle thingy
the other weapons were either useless or only useful in a couple of very specific situations

 

So I'm at the end of level Supremacy Tower - Entry and I don't bother looking for the pink electrical thing to open the door, instead, I build and climb up this:



This is me looking down at my creation from above:



This game is cool because of the physics, you can find novel ways to advance through the game.

I think the 'dynamic diffulty' AI thing is not very good because it reduces the challenge too often, I was constantly playing at about 50-60% challenge with 80-90% skill, it should have been 80-90% challenge with about 20-30% skill. I did set the 'challenge' slider on extreme, the highest possible setting, when I started the game.

The real challenge so far has been finding the level secrets, not wasting enemies - they're easy. Been playing the game for about 2-3 days on and off and I'm only on the second Supremacy Tower level. But this is because I didn't allow myself to go onto the next level without finding every single level secret. Incase you haven't found them all, they apparently just get weirder and weirder. At the end of Supremacy Tower - Entry, there is a level secret where you have to stack barrels similairly to the image above and in the exact same area, but only three stacked barrels are needed and you just hop a fence, then it's pure weirdness with some funny music, not much in the way of ammo and health, sort of like the mutated frozen fish in the water to the power of ten.

Anyway, this game is pure ownage. Everything from the 3 weapons limit to the statistics and the physics in between makes for a serious game that you can apply yourself to intelligently. And the icing on the cake is that the game is full of off-beat, sometimes hilarious background stuff, which in the case of some of the level secrets, seeps into the foreground. Simply cannot wait for a multiplayer. As for episodic content, I'm so down with that. It's worth the money. I can see it becomming a cult classic. Ritual have masterfully made use of the physics engine, and gave Half-Life 2 a very cool and pretty facelift. Not to mention the gameplay which is the best part: original, challenging, innovative and most importantly thoroughly enjoyable. You can't tell me shooting U4 filled barrels and carrying them to get slowmo, dropping them to shotgun yellow counter-strike-type-guys in the face and shoot regenebiotic cannisters in the corner to weaken some mutants is not cool. Because it is.

PS: Unless you didn't pay tax, the game was about 13GBP - 25USD. That's how much it cost me to download, no disc.

PPS: Sorry if those images are too small, but I think posting larger ones would break forum rules. Assuming it doesn't break any rules I can post presumably temporary direct links (not entirely sure how imageshack operates) for 640x800 res images or larger in another post if someone has problems seeing those small images.

PPPS: If you thought this game played like a mod, you should check out Sin 1. That comes with Emergence when you buy it, it's just a Quake 2 mod, and more noticably a mod. Sin 1 is extremely hard, I tried finishing it on it's hardest setting ('HardCorps,' I believe) and simply couldn't. I had to godmode and noclip my way through the second half. Oh, and if you thought Doom 3 went a little crazy with the darkness-impossible-to-see-what-you're-doing-nonsense, well check out Sin 1 for where they got the idea.

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The following paragraph slightly spoils the ending, but I see it as informing potential customers of a flaw in the game, something they should be aware of.

OK, turns out I was premature in my confidence with the episodes thing. This game doesn't have an ending - You don't even get to kill anyone significant at the end, all you can do is shoot at the guy enough to make him go away!. Rather than nicely wrapping up a period in a saga like, say, Kill Bill Vol. 1, it soap-operas up the ending a la Matrix: Reloaded. Lame. And, to add insult to injury, there is some offensively-not-funny pixar style nonsense after the credits. Aside from that, the game was cool. Now I'll finish it in HardCorps mode because I'm hardcore and when the multiplayer comes out I will be owning people left, right and centre.