Forum Overview :: Reviews :: It's Half-Life 2 from an alternate history where the Soviets won Half-Life 1.

[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]The ESCAPE FROM THE SEWER mission - more specifically, my first encounter with the ticks* - was easily the lowest point of the entire game. (Shocking, I know.) After that it started to pick up, and I think I did the entire second half in a single session. All I can say is if you like Half-Life, you'll like this, because it's pretty much exactly the same thing. I'm not sure if I enjoyed it slightly more or slightly less than Half-Life 2; this had a better story (in that it actually had a story, with a beginning and an ending and everything, and the action didn't stop dead every time some scientist felt like prattling at me), but Half-Life 2 had better achievements** and fewer pointless RPG elements***. I'd say it's a wash. *Swarms of tiny, fast-moving suicide bombers, any three of which will kill you on hard difficulty, that the designers seemingly delight in spawning both in front of and behind you (from areas you've already cleared!) at the same time. PROTIP: using your TMD on one will cause it to grow old and fat and any nearby ticks to immediately turn on it. The game tells you this, but not until you've already killed dozens of them the old fashioned way (or figured it out on your own I guess, if you're a genius time scientist in real life). **All the achievements in Singularity are things like "kill twenty enemies with the assault gun"**** or "find ten hidden doodads". I ended up finding only NINE hidden doodads, not because I wasn't looking hard enough, but because it seemed like every five or ten minutes I'd walk through a perfectly ordinary-looking open door only to find the game had automatically closed and welded it shut behind me. YOU CAN'T DO THAT IN A FUCKING COLLECTATHON. Can you imagine if Jak and Daxter pulled that shit? They'd never live it down. ***One of the things that really helped me enjoy Singularity was when I pulled a Dean Takahashi and finally spent some of the chrono-credits I'd been hoarding all game on upgrades from the upgrade machine. The most essential of these was Sharpshooter, which boosts the accuracy of your weapons and complements my unique playstyle of "putting the crosshair where I would like my bullets to go please". ****That particular achievement is called "A Salt and Battery", which doesn't even make any sense. Is it a fish gun? Does it shoot fish? Are your enemies fish? Sadly, none of the above, it's just a regular assault rifle that shoots regular bullets at regular commies. I wonder if it's somewhere in Microsoft's technical requirement checklist that every achievement has to have some terrible pun for a name. Here's what's written on the chrono-chalkboard in my research laboratory right now:"J Allard = The Cryptkeeper??"[/quote]