Sexiest Videogame Villainess - SiN Episodes: Emergence (Retro Review)
Entry posted by ExtraMana
1654 views
Elexis sinclair (hyper-sexualized villainess of the SiN franchise)
SiN Episodes: Emergence has all the elements that could have made a great game. Bombastic characters, comical gratuity both in gore and in partial nudity and a much laid back if not heavily generic storyline. If you take the final product for what it is, one 9th of a much larger game with multiple plot strands, a sprawling Universe and an internal lore, emergence comes off as rather disappointing. There are clearly sections where you could see the developers had planned to make a cohesive Universe with this rather sloppy first chapter just acting as an introduction. So when you play emergence it’s kind of difficult to take any of it to heart. Technically emergence is a sort of sequel or at least expansion of the 1998 SiN series.
SE:E may as well be a reboot taking a few things from the original Sin with it, such as the iconic handgun, and the teasing villain Alexis, who probably wouldn’t even be allowed if the game was made today, due to outrage merchants with nothing better to do then ban fun. But that’s a thread not worth pulling on at this point. The game is about 3 hours long your first play through, and that includes time to deal with a few very Half Life 2-esque physics puzzles and intractable segments that are pretty much either about pushing button, or blowing something up. The gunplay is solid but since emergence is a slice of what was to be a designed to be a much bigger pizza.
In SE:E You only get 4 weapons. Blade’s trusty handgun that is perfect for head shots early on, a magazine fed shotgun, and a scoped assault rifle and incendiary grenades. The weapons handle similarly to Half Life 2’s just with a different damage scaling. The gore in SE:E however is considerably ramped up when compared to HL2. Head shots are now much more satisfying. The flying solider and the big guys will explode when killed and generally speaking weapon feedback is more responsive. The enemies AI is pretty bad regardless of difficulty, as they will walk toward you and fire without bothering with any flanking, regrouping or cover tactics The only way difficulty gets increased is by adding more enemies. SE:E is very old school in its gameplay but I honestly didn’t mind that. The game’s narrative is perhaps unsurprisingly rather perhaps. It focuses on a single pro-longed chase sequence as the player is tasked with following the villains through no more than 3 locations. Firstly a shipping port, then an underground lab, and lastly a high rise building. No points for story originality can be given here. SE:E’s campaign serves as a very weak first episode to what was clearly intended to be a much more expanded universe.
You can see some pretty big corners where cut during development. Underwater sections are missing tones of detail, some areas have basically no proper lighting, and wherever they could the developers either repeated textures or just didn’t bother to add much detail. There is also a few glitches where you’ll see a villain who is meant to appear in a cut scene later on just sort of appears in partially textured form and disappears. Design wise the game is pretty sloppy. And yet I still feel compelled to defend it.
SE:E was a throwback to 90’s shooters, and although the end result feels like a bit of mess that leaves the player with more questions than it answers the game is still fun to play. The various quips from our heroes add a much needed sense of humor to it all and act to distract you from the games glaring flaws. Nowadays SE:E serves as a relic to a different era in Pc games and one that is likely to be only enjoyable to fans of old school first person shooters due to the game’s throwback nature.
Comicconreviews.blogspot.co.uk. (2016). ComicConReviews: Retro Review - SiN Episodes: Emergence (Pc). [online] Available at: http://comicconreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/retro-review-sin-episodes-emergence-pc.html [Accessed 16 Aug. 2016].
0 Comments
Recommended Comments
There are no comments to display.