There's good and bad to
Enter the Matrix, and I think a lot of it boils down to two things:
1) Your luck
2) Your expectations
The reason you're not seeing only rave reviews of this game has to do with technical problems, which I'll address, and the extreme amount of hype surrounding the release of the game, which I'll briefly cover. This is probably my longest Epinion yet, but it's because there's a lot to impart about this game.
The Basics
The purpose of Enter the Matrix is to let you play along within the movie trilogy. Instead of rehashing the movie's events or writing a separate story that might not hold up to the quality of the films, the creator of Enter the Matrix (Shiny Software) has done a brilliant thing: they've treated the game like the movie. This means they worked closely with creator/directors
The Wachowski Brothers. They not only used the actors to film--really film--sequences of the game, they also ran through huge volumes of motion-capture work, catching each and every possible move the characters can make and the possible ways they can make it. And they made sure every element of the game dovetails nicely in with both
The Matrix trilogy and
The Animatrix, the animated series of shorts that also ties in with the films and was released this past summer. The game plays with a combination of in-game dialogue, in-game cinematics, and actual high-quality film-footage cinematics, some of which come from
The Matrix Reloaded, some of which are unique to the game.
I've had people tell me they're annoyed at this idea; that it's a gimmick to make you buy everything Matrix-y you can or else you don't get the whole story. I disagree: none of the events in the game have to be seen to appreciate the films. And although it helps to have seen the films, all you really need to know is what these people can do when they're in the Matrix.
Background (skip if you've seen either movie)
For those of you who don't know any of this, here's the concept: humanity has been captured by the machines. Most of the Earth's population are lying asleep, living their lives in an artificial reality called The Matrix. A small number of people are awake and alive in reality, and believe me, reality really bites. The world has fallen apart, the planet is almost ruined, and their lives are a constant hell of
Terminator-like battle against the machines. The soldiers in the resistance's army are people who can battle on the Earth's surface in flying submarine-like ships, but they prefer to actually "jack in" to the Matrix and fight the enemy on its virtual home turf.
Because these people know that reality is a computer program, they're like lucid dreamers: they can "hack" reality by performing some incredible feats - picture
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon mixed with
The Replacement Killers and you've probably got it.
The computerized controllers of the Matrix have what they call "agents" - programs that look like people but have the same extraordinary skills as our heroes. They are unbelievably hard to fight and your companions are not kidding when they tell you to do your best to avoid them.
Getting Started
You can play the game one of two ways: as "Ghost", a man who's good with weapons and explosives, or "Niobe", the captain of your small ship who excels at combat and physical feats. Every time you play the game, events will fall the same way, but you will have a different part to play if you're Ghost than you would as Niobe. For example, in driving scenes, Ghost always shoots and Niobe always drives.
Once you've chosen your character, the game begins with a good example of how the Matrix stories mesh: you have to retrieve a package from a post office. The package contains critical information we can see in
Final Flight of the Osiris, an animated short on
The Animatrix video that also debuted in the theatrical release of Stephen King's
Dreamcatcher. The information in this package is going to be passed along to a character with a role in
The Matrix Reloaded, and what they learn from it shapes major events of both the film and the game. The cinematics do a good job of telling you what you need to know and not going overboard on exposition. This is good because it reduces confusion and keeps the story moving along. There are times when the cinematics appear several in a row. This is bad because it means you spend several minutes at a time just sitting still and watching.
Gameplay - Kung-Fu and Gun-Fu
Your character can do a large number of neat things as you play the game. Fortunately, you don't have to memorize a huge list of combinations in order to do them: the controls are very well mapped out to the interface. The more complex feats--such as running along walls, flipping backwards, or jumping sideways while turning a cartwheel and firing a gun--are performed by holding down the SHIFT key to enter "Focus" mode. As long as you hold the key down, the character will be in a special "Bullet-time" (think "Slow motion") where they move very fast and everyone else is slowed down. The "Focus" feature is often compared to the bullet-time in
Max Payne. There are some similarities: the change of speed is about the same, both games make the sounds and colors appear slightly shifted, but I think Enter the Matrix makes it much easier to get into and out of bullet-time without wasting your precious reserve of this power. Also, because even bullets slow down in Focus, it's easier to avoid getting shot than in Max Payne, where most shots are still pretty fast.
Even with the "Focus" advantage, you can still do a lot of things outside of this accelerated state. If you're close enough to your opponent, you can perform some very intricate kung-fu, grapple with and throw them, or even take their weapon and use it on them. As you play the game, a "Tip" box will pop up (usually at a spot where you really ought to try the Tip out). You can pause the game and take a look at the new tip you've gained, and it will explicitly tell you how to do something. Tips don't seem to be earned, however - I found myself doing some of the more advanced moves in the game long before I got a "Tip" telling me how to do it.
As I played the game, I found it very easy to do most of the moves you can learn. I even got pretty good at stacking them: thinking, "I'll cartwheel right, leap forward, run up the left wall, come down behind the guy back-to-back with him, and plant my foot in his spine with a back-kick while I shoot the guy next to him."
And then I'd do it. That's what makes Enter the Matrix so much fun: you really feel like you're doing the moves you see in the films. When you're fighting multiple opponents, the directions you move the controls make it easy to kick and punch to the front, side, and back. When I first got this game, I really doubted that it would play this way, but it truly does. There are times when your enemies will fight back with you, and some of them even do a good job of blocking and counter-attacking. You can't always take down an opponent by banging the Punch and Kick buttons again and again. Even if you do use this approach, you'll notice that your character moves naturally: combatants don't just twitch through the same animation for every punch, they bob and weave, duck, spin, and do all the other things physically necessary to perform their moves. Sometimes a kick is a roundhouse; sometimes it's a sidethrust. Punches can flip upwards into a block for you, then grab the opponent's arm and pull them into an attack. You can really see how much time was spent doing motion-capture on the actors.
Despite these nuances, there are drawbacks: your opponents may know kung-fu, but their AI isn't very smart. Most of them fling themselves at you, or run towards you too fast to stop and mount an attack when you close in on them. You can kind of understand this mentality with some of the S.W.A.T. officers you have to fight: they've got greater numbers, body armor, and heavy weaponry; none of them is prepared for you to run 90 degrees up the wall and stomp on their head. In one tight corner I literally ran circles around an officer; I climbed the wall, ran along the corner and came in behind him, shooting all the while and ending it with a shotgun blast. Since I did it all in Focus time, I could see him try to get off a shot, then turn enough to try and elbow me with the butt of his shotgun, then turn all the way around and try to grab me. He
was reacting; he just wasn't "pro-acting". Most of the time, they'll mill about behind cover, then rush in when they think you're not looking.
There are more flaws to the gameplay: sometimes when you're doing a lot of kung-fu, your character will holster their weapon in order to continue, and you have to draw it again. If you make a wrong move in Focus, you have to watch your character take forever to move on to the correct move - sometimes I'd get shot because I was standing ten feet away showing off my armpits. Some moves aren't easy to get into and out of. For example, if you're crawling hand-over-hand on a pipe, you can hook your legs on the pipe, hang upside down, and draw and fire your weapon. When I first had to grab the pipe I had a hard time getting onto it - I had to take a leap of faith and jump into open space. Then once I did the hang, I got stuck - I could look around and shoot, but I couldn't put my weapon away or go back to crawling hand-over-hand along the pipe. I figured out the trick: you have to pick a weapon with a scope like the sniper rifle. For some reason, being able to zoom in & out also makes you able to un-do the hanging trick.
And speaking of the sniper rifle, there's my biggest complaint: I'm a supa-mastah rockstar of Kung-fu, I can pick up any weapon and use it like a pro, but when I hold still, put a rifle to my shoulder, and peer into the scope, I suddenly turn into Jim Carrey. It's aggravating to have the scope ricochet all around the screen, and different levels of zoom don't seem to make any difference.
Another drawback to the game is the driving levels. They're exciting and they can be fun, but they get pretty frustrating. One level aggravated me because I floored it to my destination, couldn't get in, and eventually figured out that I'd gotten there too soon. I then had to drive around a while and come back. The controls are really touchy: sometimes they're over-sensitive, other times they don't do you any good. Especially if you're stopped by a collision: backing up doesn't work very well, nor can you move left & right as quickly as you should. You don't have a rear-view mirror: instead, you hold down the "action" key and your view will change. It's a slow pan around the car from the outside, and this view puts the camera over the car and about 8 feet in front of the hood, looking back. Because you're facing the other way, controls suddenly reverse: moving left jinks the car right and vice versa.
There are some pluses to the driving levels. Smashing into an impact barrel actually sprays water everywhere like in the movie. If a police car sees you approaching from behind, they actually plan their sideswipes and make it challenging to get around them. And you can get some good physics into your moves - if you wait for the cop car in front of you to try to sideswipe you, then jerk the wheel the other direction, you can crash them into a guardrail if you hit just a corner of their vehicle. It's not all believeable, though: there were times when the least nudge from behind threw my car up into the air in ridiculous directions. Or I'd get up on two wheels and be unable to get down again.
Environment
The feel of the games is pretty well done: when you are in different buildings, you can tell they're unique. The textures are different, the architecture changes, and the look of the buildings is consistent: the Post Office's lobby, for example, looks different from the processing area, which looks different from the offices, but all look like they're part of the same building. You even get sets from the movie replicated in painstaking detail. There's a long sequence where you are in a character named
The Merovingean's enormous chateau, and the attic looks musty and old, while the home itself looks pristine. You can almost imagine the pompous character walking you on a tour, pointing out how much he loves a good
Trompe l'oeil and where he cadged his Classical painting collection from. The sounds are decent: they could be better, but keep in mind that I don't really have a sound card: just software. The game says that it supports some very advanced environmental sounds, and that they work best on a 6.1 system (Sound Blaster Audigy 2 recommended), but I don't have anything like that on my Inspiron. On the one hand, I knew when my enemy was reloading, or if more were hiding because I'd hear the distinctive *click-clack* of their gun's slide/bolt action. On the other hand, I could only place their location about half the time. Usually I just had to guess.
Cool tip: last night I pushed the sound and video out to a 32" TV and my receiver, using standard "patch-cord" style plugs. The game properly mixed the sound so the effects went through the left & right speakers and the music and voice came from the center channel! I even got some nice whomp from the enormous subwoofers.
The music in this game is really good: most of the action borrows the score from
The Matrix Reloaded. Key parts of the game drop into some really good techno, like
Fluke's
Atom Bomb. The game could use a few more electronica moments like these, though: after a while the panicky horn-blats that kick off every time you confront an enemy get old.
Bugs, or "Your Mileage May Vary"
There are some very good reasons for people to hate Enter the Matrix: it's not for everybody. The system requirements are downright ludicrous: the box even tells you that you need a 7200RPM hard drive. The average computer user has no earthly idea what theirs is!
But I'm telling you the truth: I do NOT meet all the requirements. Those that I do meet don't reach the "recommended" levels. And yet, I can play the game at ANY setting. Unlike the horrible gameplay issues I had in Unreal II (
http://www.epinions.com/content_125041938052 ), Enter the Matrix has been very tolerant of my system and has adapted to my machine better than any game I have played. My hard drive is only 5400RPM. My video card is only 32MB. I'm on a laptop, the bane of game support techs everywhere. But I regularly play Enter the Matrix at 1600x1200x32-bit, run high anti-aliasing, filtering, and textures, and only when I've been playing a while does it start to get a smidge jerky. Niobe has an elaborate overcoat that looks like alligator-skin covered in gold trim. The mirrored sheen of her outfit shines with the background and doesn't flicker with render problems.
And speaking of video cards...Enter the Matrix's box description gives the impression that the game doesn't work with a video card that's not from
nVidia or
ATi, specifically the NVidia GeForce 256 or ATI Radeon 8500. That's not right; you *do* have to have a card that has "T&L" (Transform & Lighting) hardware. Before I bought the game I had the impression that it flat would not work outside the NVidia/ATI playing field. Really it's just a matter of a)whether you have T&L technology; b)if you have Windows Media Player 9 or above, c)that your drivers absolutely must be up to date, and d)that you install DirectX 9.0 or higher on your system. That doesn't mean you have to have the firmware support for DirectX 9.0 at the hardware level, just the software will do.
And you'd be crazy to think you could play the game without patching...the patches started rolling out within days of the game hitting the shelves.
Probably the one solid requirement is the processor: I tried installing Enter the Matrix on a PIII 550MHz desktop that has one mammajamma of a video card, but the minimum is 800MHz and they mean it - I couldn't even install the thing. One good feature, though: when you launch the game, you get a *ton* of controls. You can tweak everything down to the color and gamma levels. This is helpful because sometimes I can't see my laptop's screen very well and I need to brighten things up. By the way, the changes affect every aspect of the game, cinematics and menus included.
There is some bad game design in Enter the Matrix. Like the driving mission I finished too soon. And the opening level has a really bad problem with "clipping"--this is when someone on the other side of a wall or door will constantly slip half-in, half-out. Sometimes they can shoot you through a wall and there's nothing you can do about it. The clipping appears to have gone away in later levels, but it's a real nuisance in the Post Office.
And there are bugs. Most people who bought the game right away got a raw deal; typical of many games these days, it was unfinished and rushed to the shelves. Until the patches came along, there were LOTS of problems. And even now I read about people having trouble. There's a level where you have to find a flashlight to continue. Once you start looking around, it's not actually a flashlight at all: it's a gun. Unless you knew that, you might walk by and never pick it up, especially if you already had that gun and its ammo was full. Once you get the, *ahem*,
flashlight, it sometimes turns itself off. I've noticed that sometimes when I load my game, it'll only come on when a gun--any gun--is drawn. Put the gun away, and off it goes.
The only other real "bug" I've encountered is that in some of the cinematics, the car's wheels are square. It's hilarious to watch, but it doesn't appear to affect the game.
And like I say, the driving interface just isn't that great. Even the
Grand Theft Auto series performs better, and I don't feel like theirs is any great shakes, either.
Summary
Enter the Matrix isn't for everybody. Because there are people who may have problems, it's not a game I'd pay a lot of money for (mine was US$9.99 after a US$20 rebate from Amazon.com). If you know your machine meets the requirements, I highly recommend you give it a go. You don't even have to be a fan of the movies to enjoy it - like Max Payne, it can stand well on its own.
Good luck!
System Specs
I played Enter the Matrix on a:
Dell Inspiron 8200
Intel Pentium IV - 2.0GHz w/400MHz FSB
1,024MB (1GB) RAM
32MB nVidia GeForce Go 440MX Video card
Crystal Audio sound system
Windows XP Pro
Epilogue: The Hype
The Matrix saga has suffered from its own success. When the second movie (The Matrix Reloaded) came out, it had been 4 years since the first film. Although I happen to feel the film is fantastic, it got panned by some die-hard fans of the original. I think it was because too much time had gone by, and the hopes and expectations were so high that with some people, no film could meet them.
It's common in the videogame industry to plan out a timeline, then chop it down midstream. Suddenly projects get rushed, budgets get cut back, the people who put in hard work and long hours making the games get laid off, and those in charge suddenly decide they want it
yesterday. Unfortunately for Shiny, they had to deal with the added pressure of a)the hype for the movie, b)getting the game out to time with the movie's release, and c)a great deal of promotion and P.R. for the game that was designed to also heighten the anticipation of the second movie - it was supposed to be a "Matrix Summer". I remember watching a long video about the making of this game before it came out. You got to see everything they did to build it, and it was so amazing to watch that I was really convinced this would be a major milestone in gaming, the convergence of game and cinema.
Unfortunately, the problems I've pointed out here have (I think) caused Enter the Matrix to fall from grace far harder than The Matrix Reloaded. Imagine the huge disappointment the most loyal of fans must have felt when they made a beeline for the store on opening day and paid US$50-60 for the game, only to get it home and spend days watching crash after crash, or see it perform poorly. I was shocked to read that on the console systems this game would crash - that's a forgivable offense for the PC, but if I owned an X-Box or Playstation I wouldn't stand for it.
Addendum:
If you have *any* doubt about your video card, you should see the comments in both this Epinion and the following two reviews:
http://www.epinions.com/content_103349980804
and
http://www.epinions.com/content_102458363524
Both reviews' comments thoroughly debate the video card issue...
