Do you Sin?

Spanning the cover of several big name magazines, Sin is definitely one of the most anticipated games of the '98 Christmas season. Developed by Ritual Entertainment, the same talented crew who created the highly successful Quake mission pack "Scourge of Armagon," there was no doubt in my mind that Sin's levels were going to be nothing short of spectacular. But what about the game itself? Did it have enough spice to break out of the run-of-the-mill shooter trap? How does it stack up to its competition, namely Klingon Honor Guard, Shogo: MAD, Delta Force, and Half-Life? I guess that's what we're here to find out.

While this review is focused on the patched version of Sin, it would be unfair to our readers if we didn't at least mention the problems and bugs that afflicted the original and consequently shipped version of the game - which most of you will end up buying and possibly playing before jumping on the net for the patch. First and foremost, the most noticeable problem was the level loading time - On my P2/500mhz w/ 128 megs RAM, it oftentimes took around a minute for a level to load. A person with the minimum Pentium 166mhz system recommended on the box probably had time between levels to get up, get a coke, order a pizza, take a leak, and still make it back in time before it was done loading.

This was such a big issue for Sin because, unlike previous games, each of the levels were HUGE, packed with scripted sequences, cut-scenes, multiple voice-overs, and other goodies designed to keep the game more than just a blind shooter. This meant that all of these additions had to be crammed into the level loadtime in order to keep the game from constantly swapping to disk. The unfortunate result was a screen-wide progress meter between each level. A mission description was given, helping to pass the time, but you only read it once, after which it just became an excruciating wait whenever you died or worse, restarted the level.

Wonder how I can sin with that?