Gaming Trend Review
SiN Episodes: Emergence
- Official Site
- Platform: PC
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Developer: Ritual
- Release Date: 05/10/06
- Genre: Action/Adventure
Pros
- Ritual created an iconic villainess in Elexis Sinclaire and she’s terrifically played in this.
- The individual characters and settings combine to make you feel like you’re starring in an action film.
- Some very nice use of the Source engine’s graphics and physics throughout.
- Great vocals as you pick enemy groups apart.
- The game tracks literally every statistic you can think of and more.
- Tons of secrets to find some of which are laugh out loud funny.
- Ending is a nice setup for part two.-Funny outtakes during the credits.
- You get the original SiN as an extra, even though time has not been kind to it.
Cons
- Level design is stale and boring.
- Gameplay is everything we’ve seen in a dozen previous incarnations from the past five years.
- Game is only four hours (and change) long.
- The final levels just throw tons of ridiculously tough enemies at you instead of trying something original.
- One too many parts where you have to sit still while tons of enemies shoot you.
- The thin story runs out of gas completely by the end which leads one to wonder how Ritual intends to keep this going for the proposed nine total episodes.
by Mitch Youngblood
There wasn’t a single moment while I played Sin Episodes: Emergence that I didn’t hear a movie trailer voice over saying things like, "In a world where technology was lord" and "In a time where corporations ruled supreme." You picture yourself sitting in a darkened movie theater watching a trailer that shows a highlight reel of things blowing up, glass shattering, a voluptuous villainess manically cackling, all capped off by a "directed by Michael Bay" credit at the end.
It’s only appropriate then that Sin Episodes: Emergence succeeds in emulating the very action films it liberally cribs from because the testosterone-fueled game is loud, brash, and doesn’t do much other than show how pretty explosions can be. The game is fun in spurts and if you’re looking for a good afternoon time waster then this is definitely a way to spend the time. Like any one of a dozen cookie cutter action flicks, Sin Episodes: Emergence is one title that is more interested in appealing to as many people as possible rather than focusing on a coherent narrative.
I’ll confess to that not always being a bad thing, and there are a lot of things about the game to recommend it. But if originality is among your requests then look elsewhere. There is nothing here you haven’t seen done elsewhere, but there is enough fun and funny to warrant at least one play through for the $20 price tag.
The Source engine appears to be aging nicely because Sin Episodes: Emergence is a very pretty game that looks solid even on low end machines. The good news is that the game won’t tax your processor with insane load times either. I was one of the beta testers of the game and when I played through it back in early spring the load times were absolute killers. The good news is that those have been fixed. The better news is that the game looks beautiful and flows smoothly from one sequence to the next. The load times don’t appear to be any longer than the ones in Half-Life 2 and those were hardly a deal breaker.
Water always seems to be a major sticking point for artists so it’s nice to see ripples that don’t appear to be animated bitmaps. If that’s what they actually are then the illusion is well hidden. The game uses ragdoll physics for the enemies so it’s fun blasting them off buildings or piers and watching how they flail around. It’s especially fun once you see how they respond to certain location-based damage. Shoot an enemy in the knees and he’ll drop and shout, "My knees!" Then he’ll continue trying to take you out from his crouching position.
The levels seriously lack imagination in design but at least they look nice. The texture work for the walls and floors were particularly solid, as was the way glass shattered a little or a lot depending on what you shot it with. Where the artists seem to run into trouble was with some of the named human characters. Just look at the hands of the guys you meet at the beginning and tell me that doesn’t look warped. When it comes to the primary characters of Elexis and your partner it becomes obvious where most of the attention was focused. Ritual knows full well that Elexis is the poster babe for the game and they spared no expense on her... renders.
The aforementioned "my knees" comment is one of many fun sounds scattered throughout Sin Episodes: Emergence. Enemy soldiers scatter when fired upon and radio in for reinforcements, or scream how they’re the last one when you take several of them out. They react well to the damage you inflict be it location-based or in their general vicinity. Weapons fire at this point is pretty much standard across all first person shooters so if you’ve heard one loud explosion you’ve pretty much heard them all. With that said, its obvious right from the start that Ritual has a sense of humor about everything and that’s well illustrated in some of the hidden sound effects. Zoom in on the main statue of Elexis in the tower lobby towards the end and you’ll here a snide remark from your partner Jessica.
Speaking of which, the voice acting is pretty dang solid. Considering the over-the-top nature of the subject matter it would have been easy for the actors, specifically for Hannah Logan who voices Elexis Sinclaire herself. Credit is owed to the Ritual team for not letting the character go all Pacino-in-Scarface on us and the fact that Elexis is both driven and coldly focused on her objective adds to her menace. She appears throughout the game in images and she is set up terrifically as the primary villain in your quest.
As a counter to the cold nature of Elexis, Jen Taylor infuses enough spunk in Jessica to give her a great kid sister vibe... right up to the point where she hits on you. That’s when I was weirded out but that could have just been me. Gamers the world over may recognize Taylor as the voice of none other than Cortana herself. The cool thing is she sounds nothing like Cortana, and Jessica could well become a fan favorite. The slick Euro-trash stylings of secondary villain Viktor Radek is brought to us by David Scully who, funny enough, also voiced a Halo character. Here he has the showy role and he obviously enjoys taunting Our Hero while coming off as his master’s bulldog. He wants to tear into Blade and you can tell it just gnaws at him that Elexis restrains him time and again. I’m interested to see whether everyone can bring their A-game to future installments.
Screenshots
The control scheme is completely customizable and follows the standard W-A-S-D keyboard plus mouse combination. Again, nothing you PC gamers haven’t seen before and there is really nothing you can’t change. The keyboard and mouse rules apply with the mouse for targeting and shooting while the keyboard is all for the movement and interaction with the game world. Oh, and when Jessica’s icon appears in the top left-hand corner of the screen, usually after looking at something specific for a moment, hitting the Tab button will activate your comm to her. For whatever reason it took me a while to figure that out despite it probably being in the tutorial section.
Move around, get shot at, shoot back at stuff, move on, find secret, blow stuff up, move on again. That’s Sin Episodes: Emergence in a nutshell so if you’re looking for original content this is not the game for you. It seems that the entire first-person shooter genre has stagnated over the past few years and by no means does this game move it forward. On the plus side, it doesn’t set the genre back either and sometimes is fun and challenging to play. Original it may not be, but you could do a lot worse for $20 than a four to six hour shooter that has a sense of humor bordering on sophomoric.
One of the big draws for this particular game has to be... wait, it’ll come to me in a second. Hang on... nope, nothing showing up. I’ve played through it twice and while it was enjoyable, it’s little more than a comfort food style of game. You know every in and out the second you start playing but somehow it’s rather relaxing. It’s very much a standard FPS so the idea of running around blasting enemies and blowing stuff up is old hat. I’d argue that the genre is in dire straits but it seems everyone and their uncle is cranking these things out now so obviously my assertion only applies to the dearth of creativity.
The story picks up a few years after the events of the first Sin and while it’s unclear how exactly Blade came to be in the situation he finds himself in at the beginning of the game, Sin Episodes: Emergence wastes little time in getting a gun in your hand and enemies in your scope. Blade then has to track down uber-wench Elexis Sinclaire and make her answer for being really naughty. There’s not a whole lot more to that, and even that seems tough to sustain towards the endgame, so how exactly Ritual intends to milk a thread-bare story for nine total installments escapes me.
One thing Ritual deserves accolades for is their statistic system which tracks literally every step you take as HardCorp cop John Blade. Every shot you land, every step you take, every kill you make, every weapon you use is tracked in the stats menu. You can always go in there and check them out to see where you are and how you’re doing and the ego throw-downs have already started online with people comparing their stats. It’s fun stuff to see, and it actually helps make the game more interesting by monitoring how well you’re doing and adjusting enemy difficulty to compensate. In theory the enemies get tougher the further along you go, but that theory goes out the window at the end when all you’re facing is wave after wave of ridiculously tough and heavily armored mini-gun wielding baddies who explode once you take them down.
Try standing toe to toe with 100 of those in a row and tell me with a straight face that’s a balanced game.
Sin Episodes: Emergence does have a wicked sense of humor though as some of the secrets buried throughout the game are inspired comedy. One of the later ones even takes a swipe at Duke Nukem Forever also known as the joke that just keeps on giving. Finding all of them has a surprising effect late in the game, so be on your toes and look in the most out of the way places and what you find may surprise you.
The game remains start to finish a very standard first-person shooter albeit one with ragdoll physics and shiny explosions. There are also a ton of secrets hidden throughout the game, some of which are absolutely hilarious. Some are just crates with health and ammo but other secrets are... more elaborate in nature. All of them are worth finding though because if you do manage to find them all the final battle gets a heck of a lot easier. I’ll leave the reason for that to your discovery.
We won’t know until probably the third episode whether the Sin series will prove worthwhile, so judging one third of a three act play without seeing the other two acts feels like a disservice to the play as a whole. As a game all by itself, Sin Episodes: Emergence is bland and repetitive yet frequently funny and sometimes entertaining. You could do a lot worse for $20, but if this is a glimpse of the future then it might be best to wait for the next two installments before making the leap.
Sin Episodes: Emergence feels and plays like theater food. It’s a quick rush once you chow down, but as soon as the sugar starts digesting you start noticing things you’ve seen before. Games like this have been a dime a dozen for the last few years, and unfortunately that’s where Ritual’s mindset remains. They’re unrepentant in shoehorning a thread-bare story into a standard run-and-gun action title, yet fail to realize that the genre has advanced past this.
To satisfy our basic "blowing stuff up" needs we have the Serious Sam saga that takes things to such an absurdly over the top degree that the redundant gameplay actually feels fresh again. We also have the Call of Duty series for those moments when killing Nazis would just make the world a happier place. Ritual, on the other hand, seems to believe the exact same gameplay of a few years back still carries water today. I’m sorry to say it, Gunga Din, but the story and creativity need to be kicked up a notch for episodes two through nine otherwise people might not be inclined to pay $20 a pop for what is ultimately no more satisfying than a Twix.
