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SiN: Emergence

June 7, 2006 By D. Riley

It’s a strange thing to say, but I owe a bit of cash to our friends at Ritual Entertainment.

You’ve probably heard this one, but I’ll refresh your memory. Nearly ten years ago there was a game called SiN. It was pretty fun, but wholly eclipsed by the release of a little game you might’ve heard of once or twice: Half-Life.

It's really too bad, because SiN had a lot of cool things going for it. There were alternate paths through levels, levels that were entirely optional, alternate exits that would drop you off in different spots in the next level. For its time SiN was outstandingly non-linear. It helped that it had other neat features like a bevy of fun weapons and location-based damage, a rarity at the time that actually rewarded you for silly things like shooting a bad guy in the head. When Half-Life showed up all those little quirks didn't amount to squat in the gaming public's eyes. SiN, with its engrossing gameplay but Duke Nukem-era mentality, plummeted into the bargain bin without a second thought.

[img_assist|fid=53|thumb=0|alt=Sin 1|caption=Meet your antagonists, all four of them.]

It was there in that bargain bin I picked it up for the modest sum of $5. At the time GameFAQs was offering $50 for anyone that could write a complete walkthrough of the game. I worked with all the fervor of a starving college student and, when all was said and done, I had a gift certificate to Amazon.com in my name. This gift certificate I promptly used to buy Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube, eschewing food and other necessities for a dose of polygonal cosmic horror. That game was pretty fun.

So I was in debt to these guys. Even if SiN wasn’t the best game I ever played, it was still pretty manageable, and what’s more it allowed me to pick up a pretty great game when I had very little income to call my own. When I heard about the release of a new SiN game I figured I owed it to Ritual to give it at least a go. Not even the weird ‘we’re releasing this game as a series of nine episodes’ stance could keep me away. The first episode retailed for a shockingly low $20, which (by my calculations) would leave me $25 ahead where SiN was concerned. I pressed the pre-order button and then sat down and waited for two weeks.

Not long into the game I realized what ‘episodic’ content meant, and it was nothing promising. If SiN is any indication, it basically gives the creators license to stretch every hour of a normal game into five or six hours of actual gameplay.

If you were playing a normal game, like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3, you would probably be pretty content with seeing two or three enemies in the first hour, as well as having two or three guns to dispatch them with. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. SiN: Episode 1 will throw a similar amount of content at you in its four hours that any other shooter would give you in maybe the first ninty minutes. At the end of the game you've experienced basically the same amount of story... you've just encountered about thirty extra roadblocks of infinitely respawning enemies on the way.

The weapon selection in SiN is pathetic, and please understand that I’m not talking from a quantity perspective here. I rather enjoyed F.E.A.R. using almost the rifle and shotgun exclusively throughout the entire game. My problem comes from their quality. The weapons included in SiN: Episode 1 are the FPS standards of pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle, guns so generic they might as well have a barcode stamped on them. They are boring, most are pathetically weak, and the majority of the secondary fires are a joke. If you don’t have any bullets/grenades for the assault rifle by the end of the game, you might as well just consider restarting. It’s the only gun that’s good for anything, and even that’s a specious claim considering Ritual upped the recoil on it to the point where you actually have to move the mouse in the opposite direction you're firing just to keep your aim steady.

Stand-alone grenades are impossible to use. They bounce around like flubber, ricocheting off walls, people, and desk plants at will. On the off chance you actually hit someone at least it's a one hit kill. Considering that even lightly dropping one at your feet causes it to zoom off like a rocket, actually hitting enemies with grenades really dooesn't happen all that often. They are best chucked two or three at a time, preferably with a solemn prayer beforehand. If you can manage all that you’ve got a pretty good chance of killing one guy with them.

And what about enemies? It’d be difficult to describe them without mentioning Ritual’s much vaunted scalable difficulty, where the game reacts to your skill and gives you a more appropriate challenge. When I played this meant lots of headshots would cause the badguys to start donning helmets, which just means you have to shoot them in the head an extra time. The difficulty is a huge joke until about halfway through, I maybe died once. Eventually the game must've decided I was paying too well and all the normal soldiers were replaced by super heavy armor chaingunners for the duration of the second hallf.

[img_assist|fid=62|thumb=0|alt=Sin 3|caption=Yellow jumpsuit guy: get used to him, you and his four thousand clones are gonna get well acquainted.]

I’ve read that there’s a patch out now that fixes this, but I don’t really care to check. The game was critically flawed when I played it and fell into that pitfall that shooters shouldn't fall prey to. You know what I’m talking about: you’re trapped in a room with three units of health health, scant ammo and no armor and you just have to keep running out into the fray to kill one enemy footsoldier before hustling back to your safe spot so you can quick-save. The only wrinkle SiN adds to this time-honored formula is that you now have a brain-dead AI partner sitting next to you in the broom closet you call a safe room, offering words of encouragement while her broken programming doesn’t allow her to exit the door and ACTUALLY HELP YOU IN THE FIREFIGHT.

Between the underwhelming weapons and bug-riddled scripting that made the difficulty so backbreakingly difficult, SiN wasn’t all that fun to play. And it's sad, because you can tell the hint of fun is there. In this time of game developers aching for complex plots and immersive worlds sometimes you want a game that throws a gun at you and tells you to just shoot everyone from point A to point B and don't worry about the consequences. The problem is that SiN encourages you to do this without knowing how to create an interesting world for you to do it in. After four or five hours with the game you’re bound to get tired of men in yellow jumpsuits approaching you with the same two guns over and over again. And just when you think you’re going to hit the ultimate threshold of excruciatingly boring gameplay your game cold-cocks you with a glitch and all the yellow jumpsuit guys are replaced by the dreaded chaingunners that are impossible to kill without sticking an assault rifle grenade directly to their face. Even then, that only MOSTLY kills them.

Your mileage may vary, I guess, since you’d be playing without the difficulty bug, but it’s not like there’s anything worthwhile in a patched version of this game either. You will encounter about four enemies in this game, only two of them show up with any sort of regularity, and they’re all as brain-dead as you’d expect from a mass produced FPS bad guy. Ritual definitely subscribes to the enemy AI philosophy that has served the creators of various videogames for decades: who needs it!! The enemies in this game are perfectly content to stand rooted to the ground and take potshots with you until you shoot them in the head. Why worry about it! There are about a dozen more around the corner when you hit the next infinite respawn point! Why bother with one quality bad guy when we can just deluge the player with fifteen moronic ones?

The story lacks quality on a similar level. It wouldn't be a concern, but the gameplay is so shockingly bad that one hopes they'd get something redeeming out of playing the game. One of the joys of the original SiN was main character John Blade’s wisecracking demeanor (a la Duke Nukem). It was totally cheesy, sure, but what do you expect from a game whose antagonist is an amazonian woman with oversized mammaries? In this game, Blade’s personality has been surgically removed and replaced with the brain of any old mute FPS protagonist. To compensate, we’re given secondary character Jessica Cannon, whose response to "the man" trying to "hold her back" (which happens more often than not) is ‘Eff you, we’re doing it anyway!!’ usually followed by the revving of a car engine. Jessica pulls off such brilliant moves as sending you into enemy territory unarmed and wounded, the aforementioned ultimate maneuver of hiding in a broom closet while there’s a massive battle going on outside, and, like all 'tough gal' heroine sidekicks, being conveniently captured when required by the plot. Also, she gets an A+ for driving into an enemy blockade and then just sitting there and waiting for you to step outside into a hail of gunfire. Thanks Jessy!

[img_assist|fid=56|thumb=0|alt=Sin 2|caption=Jessica Cannon in one of her more definitive moments.You can't hold me back, pig! *VROOM!*]

Additional characters don’t fare much better. Blade's other helper, JC, is mostly unchanged from his snarky computer hacker days, but without Blade to reprimand him it’s really just another annoying interlude to deal with. Main bad guy Elexis is still as large-breasted as ever, and Ritual positively refuses to let us forget this fact, purposely placing her in outlandish situations with her cleavage hanging out. My favorite is a dream sequence involving her in a pool of water wearing nothing more than a spaghetti-like bikini. It just oozes class. Elexis's opinions vaccilate wildly, telling Blade what great plans she has for him at one moment and sending an army of super soldiers to kill him the next. In a better game, forgivable, but in this it's just another nail in the coffin.

Honorable mention goes to secondary antagonist Radek, who also seems to go by "Roddick" (the game spells it both ways in the subtitles), a typographical error that should've been easy to notice and correct, considering the two spellings show up within seconds of each other in the very beginning of the game. For all the playtesting Ritual is convinced they did, I don't understand how so many mistakes could've been missed. A simple whirl through the game with the subtitles on was all it took for me. But then, leaving easily fixable problems in the game seems to be what SiN is all about.

SiN is annoying not because it’s bad, but because it’s a combination of every mediocre flaw an FPS has ever suffered from. By themselves none of these traits -- the total dearth of weapons, embarrassing grenade physics, poor enemy quantity, lackluster AI, or atrociously bad story –- would be enough to sink the game, but together it’s a horrific slam dance of pain that will have you question why you keep force yourself to reload your last save when you know there’s a whole greater world out there, a world without SiN. A world where people actually have fun with videogames and don’t feel like they’re being punished by them.

I believe that a world exists where saying your game is ‘episodic’ doesn’t give you an excuse to totally crap out on quality because you’ll get it right the next time. I have faith in it, and I suppose I’ll find out whether I’m right or not with Half-Life 2: Episode One. As for SiN, you could get the best part of that game -- its totally cheesy Bond-esque opening theme song -- for $0.99 on iTunes and call it a day, but even that isn't such a great deal. Being the 'best part' of a game like SiN only means you have to be slightly above mediocre. Avoid SiN in all its forms. The best thing you'll get from your $25 purchase is a free copy of the original game. If you can bear spending $25 on a game you could dig out of any old bargain bin then feel free, but this episode doesn't suggest that the new adventures of SiN are ever going to be worth your time.

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10 comments for ‘SiN: Emergence’

#1 w3a2 Jun 7, 2006 08:37pm

Sounds like what I have gone through in Pariah. Except for some reason, flaws and all, I enjoyed playing it - noteably not enough to complete it, mind you.

#2 D. Riley Jun 7, 2006 08:47pm

Well then you couldn't have enjoyed it THAT much? ;)

#3 w3a2 Jun 7, 2006 09:10pm

I don't know, but I spent more time on it than I did Halo 2.

I think it epitomised my life though, being in constant pursuit of some woman.

#4 Vendor Jun 7, 2006 10:23pm

I liked it.

#5 Dublyner Jun 7, 2006 11:20pm

I played it unpatched, with an early-game fervor for headshots. The result was that the chaingun enemies, which stats indicate made up more than half of all enemies encountered, took two direct hits with the secondary assault rifle attack to kill. I got bored and turned on godmode to finish the game, it was hardly enjoyable.

#6 D. Riley Jun 8, 2006 08:00am

Exactly what happened to me, and irritating as sin (no pun intended). Fighting as many as five chaingunners at a time with (seemingly) infinite respawns and no health powerups in sight does not a fun game make.

#7 Vendor Jun 8, 2006 12:09pm

D. Riley

I actually thought (that to some, extent, I'll admit it does get irritating) that the difficulty adjuster actually forced me to change my gameplay tactics which was neat. If I was getting too run and gun happy I found myself having to slow down and take it more tactically, which was a neat change of pace.

And I'll admit, three guns for the lose, but you can't deny that the magnum felt powerful as shit. As for the shotgun and assault rifle, I thought the AR just LOOKED stupid, and the shotgun felt too weak for me.

And the lack of Blade's whitty comments really sucked too. Not the best game I've ever played but I enjoyed it.

#8 D. Riley Jun 8, 2006 01:40pm

Vendor wrote:
D. Riley

I actually thought (that to some, extent, I'll admit it does get irritating) that the difficulty adjuster actually forced me to change my gameplay tactics which was neat. If I was getting too run and gun happy I found myself having to slow down and take it more tactically, which was a neat change of pace.

I don't think 'throw badguys at you until you run out of ammo and then repeatedly reload as you try to run through them' is a very fun tactic. The fact that you can only carry three AR grenades, which are the only effective way of killing the chaingunners, and often run into squads of five chaingunners at the time (who, most of the time don't drop ANY ammo) is ridiculous. Bug or not, obviously the game wasn't playtested that well. And it wasn't fun, not for me. I've got better things to do than hit the Quickload button 20 times in a row.

Quote:
And I'll admit, three guns for the lose, but you can't deny that the magnum felt powerful as shit. As for the shotgun and assault rifle, I thought the AR just LOOKED stupid, and the shotgun felt too weak for me.

The magnum was powerful because the other guns were so pathetically weak. The shotgun was MAYBE twice as powerful as the magnum at point bank, with more than twice the time lag between shots, and any distance that was more than an inch from the guy's nose you might as well have been shooting him with spitballs. Pathetic.

Quote:
And the lack of Blade's whitty comments really sucked too. Not the best game I've ever played but I enjoyed it.

The story was crap from the beginning, but It was a good enough braindead shooter for about an hour. Once the difficulty kicks in it's a different story. I can play for story, and I can play for gameplay, but if I'm playing for NEITHER? No thanks.

#9 Metal Monkey Jun 8, 2006 01:44pm

It was a rather lame game overall. It didn't feel like it was even a game on it own, rather a giant mod of HL2. It even had a part which was identical to the Mother AntLion battle.

#10 D. Riley Jun 8, 2006 02:43pm

Metal Monkey wrote:
It was a rather lame game overall. It didn't feel like it was even a game on it own, rather a giant mod of HL2. It even had a part which was identical to the Mother AntLion battle.

In fact, it had TWO PARTS pretty much identical to the Antlion Warrior battles. :o