 |
 |
... but is FABIO's warning too late?
|  | | | | Sorry, this game would still suck. | |
At E3...
Nixon: Enter the Matrix is a game, FABIO. That game is our enemy. But when you're inside
the marketing campaign, you look around and what do you see? Fanboys, goths, the entire
male preteen to young adult demographic...the very minds of the people we're trying to
save. Up until we do, these people are still a part of that game, and that makes them our
enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unhyped. And many
of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the game that they will
fight to protect it. Are you listening to me, FABIO, or were you looking at the booth babe
in the red dress?
FABIO: I was....
Nixon: Look again.
(FABIO turns around and to find a morbidly obese male cosplayer asscrammed into a leather
tank top making kung-fu gestures at him)
FABIO: *pukes*
Something's got to make up for all the previously mentioned crap, right?
Oh, right! The gameplay! Hahaha......no. Unfortunately, the gameplay is a sad mishmash of Oni
meets Max Payne that meets a Matrix facelift shortly before walking out of
the bathroom and noticing a bit of Rebel Assault and Interstate '82 stuck to
its shoe. Even if you happened to like just one of the above games, let me assure you that
Enter the Matrix manages to screw each formula up.
|  | | | | This grenade calls your mom a whore. | |
Kung-fu
The martial arts in this game amount to running up to an enemy and hitting
the mouse buttons as fast as you can. It's been rumored that one of them punches while the
other kicks, but all you need to know is that after a few random mashings, the enemy is
gone, a far cry from Oni where you had to at least choose between different moves.
If that sounds so complicated that you're scrambling back to Myst, then you can opt
to simply hit the 'f' key to automatically take away the enemy's gun BEFORE sending your
fist through his head. The game leaves it all up to you! Speaking of enemies, I hope you
like fighting SWAT teams, because aside from one 15 minute segment, that's ALL you'll be
facing. I get sick thrills by intentionally killing off my own teammates in Rainbow Six.
I still got bored after killing my first regiment (the game informed me that I had 1100
kills at the end) of jack-booted paramilitary thugs. Aren't there only like 100 of these
guys in the entire country? You'll fight agents a whopping TWICE during the whole game,
and each time you either have to run away or kill them using a scripted event. So much for
the potentially most fun concept behind a Matrix videogame. The instructions claim
"Only Neo can take on agents and win". THEN LET ME PLAY AS NEO, YOU FRUITS!
Look, I'm sorry the idea of Ghost and Niobe taking on agents doesn't jive with that
transvestite Larry Wachowski's "vision," but if that vision gets in the way of
making a fun game then it HAS TO GO!
Guns
At first glance, the gunplay seems exactly like Max Payne with its
third person perspective and bulletime focus (slow motion), but the
instant after you fire your first few shots and notice that your bullets fly off in random
directions nowhere near your targeting reticule, you'll realize that you're not, in fact,
INSIDE A GRAPHIC NOVEL! Remember in Dumb and Dumber when Harry completely missed
with an entire clip at point blank range? Well, someone made that into a shooter. Using
the slow motion mode improves your aim and makes it possible to actually hit something,
but not due to slowing things down, it just arbitrarily makes the auto-targeting (no, sir,
this was NOT a rushed console port!) work better. Maybe contributing to this phenomenon is
the fact that instead of the cool ripple effect bullets make in the movie, here it's just
some sort of pixely trail of white dots. It's like you're firing smoke grenades/tracers.
Driving
When you heard that, four years after the movie, they were finally making
a Matrix videogame, was your first thought "I hope there's a driving segment!"?
Me neither. You get two choices: play Ghost and be the "gunner" in a Rebel
Assault type rail shooter, or play Niobe and take the wheel in a driving sim that
makes Interstate '82 look positively slick by comparison. Playing as Ghost is
especially fun since you can witness the AI's hilariously horrible driving skills. Several
times throughout the driving levels AI Niobe will continually crash into walls where she
then takes anywhere up to a minute trying to 3-point turn her way out like some driver's
ed student. Way to dispel the myth surrounding women drivers, bitch.
The game's crowning achievement in driving comes in one of the later levels where you have
to drive down the freeway to help out Morpheus. Have you ever had a friend so stupid that
while driving him around, he does something blatantly illegal right in front of the cop
car in the next lane? Something like drinking a beer, tossing litter outside, or brandish
a machinegun out the window? The police have no idea Ghost and Niobe are there, and you
could have just kept a low profile until you reached Morpheus, but Ghost thought that it
was such a nice day out that he'd play golden retriever and stick his head out the
window.....while brandishing a machine gun.
You: "Ok so we'll go pick up some beer before dropping by Bill's place and WHAT THE
FUCK, GHOST?! Quit waving that thing around! Someone's gonna see you!"
Ghost: "Don't be a wuss, no one's gonna s-"
** Police Sirens **
You: "You IDIOT!"
Ghost: "Hey man, you're driving. It's your ass".
Within ten seconds of passing the first police car, I had multiple cops and agents on my
tail. Good job, Ghost! Have you ever considered becoming Zion fleet commander?
|  | | | | Ghost keeps a low profile, yet for some reason I'm still being chased by cops and agents. What a time for his gun to glitch out. | |
The final stage becomes even more Rebel Assault-esque as you're shooting down hundreds of
pursuing sentinels (and to think that Morpheus was freaked out by only four in the first
movie). This sequence is so horribly bug-ridden that it's unbeatable half of the time due
to the tracer graphics for your bullets randomly glitching up. Not to spoil anything, but
the last "boss" is one of those mini-sentinel homing bomb things. THE LAST BOSS
IS A MINI-SENTINEL BOMB. Gay.
Graphics
Is it any surprise they scream "beta"? Let's see: release date
coinciding with release of movie (I'm sure they pushed back the movie's release date so
they could keep that promise), simultaneous release on four separate platform, LOOKIN'
GOOD! The player models are jagged as hell and poorly animated. We've seen better graphics
in Dreamcast games than this. The only time the animation approaches acceptable is during
the in-game cutscenes, but then when it switches control back to you it's right back to
crap. One aspect about the graphics I can defend is the driving portion. Some people have
been complaining about the square wheels. Well I'm here to say that after tweaking the
settings up to maximum, I was able to get octagonal wheels. Fuck you, naysayers,
how many games do you know where you can DOUBLE the detail with a slight change in
settings? Another opportunity for a cool graphical effect, the agents dodging bullets, was
also screwed up. They look like guys in suits doing that thing that white people do when
they're trying to dance. In both instances, the results are pathetic.
Story
A huge selling point for this game is that supposedly its events coincide
with The Matrix: Reloaded and that if you don't play the game, YOU'RE NOT GETTING THE
COMPLETE STORY!!!! I thought they already tried this gimmick for selling copies of The
Animatrix, and let me tell you it's just the same level of crap. You can recreate all
the story that you're "missing" by taking every little scene Ghost and Niobe
were mentioned or seen in then imagining them traveling from point A to point B while
fighting 200 SWAT team people along the way to the next scene. There's one cutscene where
Jada Smith makes out with Monica Belluci, but that's easily cancelled out by the following
scene that takes place between Ghost and Trinity after they refer to each other as
"brother" and "sister" several times:
Trinity: "When are we going to find you a girlfriend?"
Ghost: "Like Augustine, I am devoted to a higher purpose."
Trinity: "What's that?"
Ghost: "Onanism"
Trinity: "Is that why so many saints are blind?"
Ghost: "Celibacy is a "hands on" job"
Trinity: "Mmmmmmm...."
Trinity: "Thanks, Ghost"
HOT!!!!!!!!
Let's review!
Everything this game tried to do has been done better by earlier games that not only
played better, but looked better in the process. The guns + slomotion thing was done
earlier and better by Max Payne, a two-year old game. The guns + kung-fu thing was
done earlier and better by Oni, a three-year old game. The driving + guns thing was
done better by Interstate '76, a FIVE-year old game. If this game were polished
like hell to the point where the graphics and animation were acceptable by early 21st
century standards (for which we've had the technology for THREE YEARS) then you'd have a
game that would be about on par with Oni (which was another tragically flawed game
with great potential) with better looking motion captured, but less strategic kung-fu.
I'd conclude this review by saying "There's a glitch in the matrix", but it
looks like I've already been beaten to it by every other reviewer on the planet. So take
your pick from the following
1. TAKE THE BLUE PILL! LOL!!!
2. Don't follow the white rabbit!
3. There is no spoon, or fun gameplay.
FABIO: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're
afraid of us. You're afraid of the press. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to
tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm
going to submit this review, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want
them to see. I'm going to show them a world....without you. A world without rails and
basement skylights. Without horrible AI or square tires. A world where anything is
possible. Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you.
Rage Against Shiny: WAAAAAAAAAAKE UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP!
 FABIO (with thanks to Entropy Stew for the backstory parody)
|
|
|
|
