Graphics

Dreary stuff

Anyhow, the goings-on here would still be incomprehensible even if Reeves, Fishburne, and fellow co-star Carrie-Anne Moss played the lead roles (in contrast, they’re barely seen, except in the odd clip taken directly from The Matrix Reloaded). I never got a sense of character, place, or events. A level started. I beat people up. I shot stuff. I moved on to the next scene. Consider this Third-Person Action/Adventure 101, albeit with a couple of spicy interludes featuring car chases and shootouts. The game box makes a point of asking what part you will play in the fight to save the human sanctuary of Zion, but even by the end of the game I didn’t have a clue how to answer that question. Unless it had something to do with beating the bejesus out of a dreary succession of cops and security guards. I got to know a lot about that, seeing as this is what I was forced to do throughout pretty much the entire game.

Beer goggles mode in action

Prima ballerina

Oh, goodie. Crates

Level design is dreary and unimaginative. It’s as if Shiny set out with the goal of making a travelogue showcasing the most boring places to work in America today. The game begins with a foray to a crate-strewn post office and moves on to such thrilling locales as an airport, sewers, empty highway, nuclear power plant, and deserted city streets. Nearly every setting is sterile. Graphics are dark and faded, like the computers stole both free will and color in the process of turning human beings into Eveready batteries. Textures are of poor quality and animations are rigid and cartoonish. Niobe pumps her arms like a racewalker and cops often spin like Nadia Comaneci on a good day.

It’s like wiping your ass with silk

Gameplay reminds me a lot of last year’s console-only (thank heaven for small mercies) Minority Report: Everybody Runs, another product/game where the developers couldn’t think of anything more interesting than gun battles and fistfights against a production line of cop-like bad guys. Shiny tries to mix things up a little bit with the introduction of Focus, an option where you think so hard about computer-enhanced entropy that you can run up walls and boot people in the face and slow down gunfights.

Stunning level design I

Stunning level design II

Is the arrow really necessary?

Of course, something like this is expected in a game based on the movie franchise that introduced us to bullet time and gave us psychedelic 360-degree camera effects. But Shiny is a couple of years too late in its implementation, seeing as Max Payne brought these sorts of effects to computer gaming in 2001. Everyone’s favorite noirish cop-killer did a better job at integrating them into gameplay as well. Where you actually felt pressed in Max Payne, and were truly grateful that you could slow things down every once in a while, the option is pure frill in Enter the Matrix. Aside from the cinematic coolness of defying the laws of physics, there is no need to use Focus. Enemies can be taken out by running up to them and clicking the punch and kick buttons until they drop. Or by whipping out a weapon and gunning them down. You don’t even have to worry about taking damage with this approach to combat, since health is rapidly regenerated by standing still.