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Console: PC
Company: Shiny Entertainment
Rating: 8.5 (NOT 9.5, stop questioning my authority SCHEP) out of 10
Genre: Third Person Shooter
Reviewer: Alexander Schepelmann
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| Enter The Matrix |
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You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You go to EB Games. Take out your wallet and fork over fifty bucks, and you can see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Although Laurence Fishbourne claimed that âno one can be told what the Matrix is,â it is fortunately untrue. What is âEnter the Matrix?â A fun, albeit slightly shallow extension of the Wachowski Brotherâs newest film in the Matrix Trilogy. So how does this third person action game measure up in comparison to all of the others? Let us go into the rabbit hole to find out...
Graphics
As with every major gaming title released within the last half of the year, the graphics look simply stunning. The lighting effects and textures, such as Niobeâs leather coat or Ghostâs sunglasses, shine magnificently under any conditions, whether you are fighting weird Gothic-like Vampires in the Chateau (âMax Payneâ anyone?) or are rendering SWAT Team personnel unconscious while flipping down a hallway at the Airport. The character models are smooth and behave realistically, and time can be bent to make for beautiful bullet rendering as they speed towards you.
Sadly, unlike games like Counter-Strike or Rouge Spear, which basically ran on a computer, equivalent processor and graphics wise to a cardboard box, you will need a more than decent computer to run it on the one of the lowest possible resolution settings. While the game recommends a 1.2 GHz Athlon or Pentium III, an ATI Radeon 8500, and 256 MB RAM, on these settings, the game will run about as smoothly as a man trying to skate down a hill made of gravel. I tested the game on two machines, a 1.7 GHz Celeron with a GeForce 3 Ti-200 (128 MB) and 512 MB PC133 SDRAM, as well as a 2800+ AMD Athlon XP with a GeForce FX 5200 (128 MB) and 512 MB DDR400 RAM, and the game ran at a solid 50 fps with anti-aliasing all the way up at 640x480 and 800x600, respectively. Strangely enough, the graphics take a tremendous hit when 3D sound is enabled. Why is this? Who knows? It could be due to the fact that the designers, despite the fact that they did an amazing job with character models and other aspects of the graphics took many shortcuts in developing this game.
What kind of shortcuts am I talking about? For example, in the movie, when someone dials an operator and wants to be extracted from the Matrix, they become binary code, and get sucked into the telephone. Well, in the game, the developers merely flicker the lights, and the character disappears. The same is true for the live action cutscenes. While they certainly sport the Wachowski flair, it is apparent that the same relative budget was not available to the development team at Shiny Entertainment, as it was for the post-production specialists of the movie. This is kind of sad, really, especially considering that the two products interlace at critical points of the movie.
Overall though, if you have a good computer, prepare to be as blown away as I was, when you first turn on âEnter the Matrix.â This is without a doubt the best looking third person shooter to date.
SCORE: 9.5/10
Sound:
Sound is another great aspect of âEnter The Matrix.â Filmed with the identical equipment as the movie, the game is breathtaking. Bullets whiz past you as if you were actually shot at, and the screaming of FBI agents as you break their arm in slow motion couldnât be more realistic. (Not that I have ever done this in real life myself, but I would guess that someone would scream pretty loudly if their arm was twisted like jump-rope.) The lip syncing of the real time cinemas is perfect, rivaling the upcoming lip syncing technology used in Half-Life 2. However, in order to fully enjoy the game, you must have a way to listen to the game in surround sound. The live action cutscenes themselves sport the same music found in the Matrix Film, from the classical accompaniment heard in the Chateau, to the trance-like techno that plays every time you engage in combat, the sound is another great aspect of the game.
SCORE: 9.5/10
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