Singularity

I've been a fan of Raven. Elite Force is the first game I ever played apart from Reader Rabbit nonsense, and they were overall awesome until about Wolfenstein, maybe a little before it. Wolfenstein, of course, sucked on so many balls of other franchises because it was just so generic but things are looking up for their next game.

Singularity is about you crashing on a Russian island where the Soviets used to do weird shit involving time manipulation and you must "defeat the Singularity" or something like that as one of the trailers states ominously in the middle of footage of what is either a big tentacle that's there just because or a boss. The player is given control of various things he can change not only to himself but to outside objects with the power of Chronos or something. Also it has to do with something called Element 99.

Here is the Gamespot page which contains a bunch of info and videos and all the neat stuff. However, the page should be avoided at all costs once the game comes out for fear of Gamespottian shit clogging up your internets: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/singularity/index.html

From what I have gleaned off the dark depths of trailers and gameplay videos, here is my opinion so far:

The puzzle solving looks very rudimentary. "You get to find a button to open a door. But wait! You use time to do it."

The viewing of the past thing is obviously taken from Cryostasis, but it loses its magic, revealing too much, not making the player think enough, as far as I can tell. In Cryostasis, you had various major and minor plotpoints all strewn about with various points of view to them, meaning that the player pieced everything together himself, making the story part of the gameplay. In this, the few Mental Echoes you see are people ominously fleeing from something ominous. How ominous. It strikes me instantly that they're probably setting up for the debut for the main cannon fodder enemy creature, and guess what, they are. It ends up being cheesy, more like BioShock with its conveniently placing storytelling setpieces when they'll make the most direct sense, rather than masterfully mixing them up.

However, the combat looks pretty badass, because that is the only place where the time manipulation gimmick doesn't look like it will be just that: a gimmick. I can think of plenty of games that give you slow motion and a bunch of abilities that give you directly powers to overcome enemies more easily, but I can't think of when manipulating time on their behalf has been done before, and it looks neat being able to use it as a weapon instead of a generic defense mechanism.

Discuss.