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There’s certainly something to be said for delivering games in regular small chunks. TV shows thrive by keeping viewers hooked from week to week, and there’s no reason why that model can’t work well for video games. In theory these chunks will be cheaper than a normal game, more polished and released regularly. The problem is finding the right balance between cost, quality of experience and length. Unfortunately, it’s in these very areas that Ritual’s SiN Episodes: Emergence doesn’t quite work.
From the off it’s clear that SiN is more TV than Hollywood movie. The opening few minutes are almost laugh out loud funny in terms of voice acting and character animations, and while lip syncing is excellent thanks to the Source engine, the overall presentation is somewhat lacking. The story itself isn’t too enthralling either, and isn’t what I’d expected from a game designed to hook players on the series. As Colonel John R. Blade you awake in a lab after the evil doers Elexis Sinclaire and Radek have injected you with some kind of substance.
You escape thanks to the help of Jessica, a new member of your SWAT team who also joins you in combat at various points during the episode. For the most part you’re alone though, and when the game focuses on action it’s actually very enjoyable. It’s nothing you won’t have seen before, but weapons feel powerful and enemies go down very satisfyingly after taking a bullet to the head or a blast from a shotgun at close range. Weapon choice is limited to a pistol, a shotgun and a machine gun, but each has an alternative fire mode, and the relative shortness of the game prevents things from becoming stale.
You could be forgiven for thinking that some kind of cloning has been going on, as you’ll fight the same guy for the majority of the game, often in small groups. These generic solders are joined by some heavy-weapon wielding grunts, jet-pack soldiers, the odd sentry robot and the obligatory mutated creatures. It really is everything you’ve seen in first-person shooters over the years, with creativity being limited to a nifty health canister system. While much has been made of the adaptive difficulty that the game features, in practice it’s not as revolutionary as it could have been. Enemy AI is nothing special, even when playing with the difficulty ramped up, but the frequency of health canisters is reduced dramatically, making the game much trickier as a result.
Fans of Monolith’s F.E.A.R. might feel a slight resemblance at times, particularly when you’re blasting enemies with your shotgun, blowing chunks into the air, but this really just highlights how inferior SiN is in comparison. As a simple run and gun shooter SiN feels solid enough, but first-person shooters have moved on a lot since SiN’s debut in the late ’90s. Back then the original game was trounced by Half-Life, and with such quality available in the genre at the moment, there’s more than a little sense of deja vu.
The Source engine is most famous for powering Half-Life 2, and SiN really looks like a mod for the Source engine. It’s far from an ugly game, but quality changes quite dramatically from section to section. Within a few moments you can move from playing through some strikingly realistic looking environments to something that could have been created in a bedroom. On a few occasions it’s also a little unclear about exactly what you should be doing. For a game that is so short, it’s little disappointing that everything isn’t as polished as it could be.
Once you’ve ploughed through the campaign, which could easily take less than five hours, there’s very little left to do. You can replay the game at a harder difficulty, look at your stats and… well, that’s about it. The original SiN has been included along with its multiplayer mode, but it really shows its age. When you finish Emergence you’re given a short teaser of what’s to come in the next episode, plus a blooper reel of sorts, but given the rather lacklustre story you’ve played through, the teaser falls rather flat.
For episodic content to really take off compelling storylines must be a major component. SiN Episodes: Emergence has a number of shortcomings, but its weak storyline is the most noticeable. The success of the series as a whole is riding on this first episode, but other than being a fun shooter, it does nothing to hook the player. It’s a piece of throwaway entertainment that’s available for a moderately cheap price, but considering what it needed to be, Ritual hasn’t really delivered the goods.
