by Dave - July 26, 2003

I could almost see the smile on his face as I emptied my MP5 and hit nothing but air. The silence was deafening as the last of the spent shell casings hit the rooftop. I pulled the trigger a couple more times, hoping for a miracle, but as usual, coming up short. The sane part of me was screaming to make a run for it� Run away and try to find another hardline out of the Matrix. Even the not-so-sane part was telling me that taking an agent on in hand to hand was suicide. �Looks like we are doing this the hard way.� I said as I let the submachine gun drop to the ground and squared up for the coming fight. The agent just straightened his tie and walked towards me. I mean hey, Neo takes these guys on all the time right?

Gameplay

Enter the Matrix stands out from the rest of the movie/T.V.-licensed games in the fact that it has an incredible amount of co-operation and support between the franchise creators and the game developers. Andy and Larry Wachowski (creators of the Matrix movies) wrote the storyline for the game as well, with the end result being a game that fits snugly into the plot of the movie trilogy.

You begin your journey into the Matrix with a choice of two characters with which to do battle with the denizens of the matrix. You can play as Niobe, captain of the hovercraft �Logos�, her first mate Ghost. As either character, you must track down a package in the Matrix and warn Zion of its impending doom at the hands (or claws rather) of a sentinel army. For those of you who want to find out more about the origins of the package, you can watch the Animatrix short called �Final Flight of the Osiris.� In fact, if you have not yet seen any of the Animatrix shorts, I strongly urge you to go and rent the DVD.

An hours worth of cut scenes is nestled into the game and break up the missions quite nicely. These cut scenes were filmed during the making of the 2nd movie, using the real actors and real sets. If a game could be judged on the cut scenes alone, Enter the Matrix would be getting a solid 10/10 and a game of the year award. Sadly, it cannot and should I even try it I would most likely get a kick in the rear from my editor. In short: we have a great storyline and some kick-ass cut scenes, but why does the game only get a score of 6? Prepare yourselves� The rest of the review isn�t going to be pretty.

The levels in this game are, for the most part, ridiculously short. While this may be fine for a console platform, the PC can handle a little more. In one level I had to cross a mail sorting area and get to a freight elevator while taking on some security guards. I kid you not when I say that level was 30 seconds long before the next load screen pops up. This quickly becomes a minor pain in the ass, but at least the level load times are equally diminutive. Watching the 2nd movie in the theatres, I was disappointed to see that Neo and company didn�t take on the vampires. Well in this game you get to take them on in all their fanged, nigh-invulnerable glory, complete with wooden stake �Buffy style� action. Even the undead cannot save this game from it�s most glaring fault; the controls.

Playing this game, at times, is like grabbing a large rock and caving in the side of your skull. During my stint as Niobe, I was on the run from multiple agents in an apartment building. I clipped a corner but instead of just running in place against the wall I automatically put my back against it and entered �peek mode�. While appreciative of the sneaky view down the hallway, I was a little more concerned about the two agents right behind me. One grabbed me by the neck and threw me to the ground. As I staggered to my feet, the second agent grabbed me and repeated the throw. Again and again this happened until I died. There is no defence against that move when you are backed into a corner. It�s like playing Street Fighter II with your opponent pulling the same cheap move over and over. Another time I missed the door I was supposed to go through and had to double back through two agents. As I was running past, one clipped me with a bullet and for whatever reason the game decided to enter combat mode. This changes the controls and stops me from running which is great for hand to hand, but I don�t want to circle the agent, I want to go through the damned door. Needless to say, with an agent on either side of me I suffered another 30 seconds of throat grabbing and floor tasting.

Bullet time lets you slow down the action to pull off the incredible martial arts moves and leaps that set the Matrix apart from the other action movies out there. It makes running through rooms of baddies easier and does a good job of capturing the feel of the movies. A quick duck into a secluded area will regenerate your health and bullet time bars, letting you keep the action going full tilt.

You have a variety of weapons to play with as you take on the agents and their minions but you need no skill to use them except for the rifles when in �sniping� mode. Thanks to the auto-aim feature, ranged combat is a simple as facing in the direction of the enemy and pressing the left mouse button. While adequate for a Nintendo game, we are talking PC here. If I can sink a couple of thousand into a gaming system, at least take advantage of what it can do. The driving controls leave a lot to be desired as well, with the cars handling worse then some of the value priced racing games that I have fallen victim to. The Logos is even worse. What good is the ability to pilot the fastest hovercraft in the human fleet, if all you do is go down the same hole for 10 minutes? I just held down the throttle and was able to pass 90% of the obstacles with the other 10% of the time I actually had to steer or slow down.

One neat feature that saves Enter the Matrix from the trash is the ability to �hack� the game. This is a neat feature and is a great improvement over the standard console command cheats. If you have no idea how to use any computer language (we are a minority, but we exist) there are enough sites with hacking guides, that in no time you will never worry about running out of ammo again. The list of stuff you can add while hacking is much too large to list here, but it pretty much covers everything in the game. One advantage to the PC is that you can play with game files. Some adventurous souls have discovered that you can swap files and instead of playing as Niobe or Ghost, you can play as Neo. Now if someone could help me play as one of the Security guards I would be really happy.

Despite the great storyline and its place in the Matrix trilogy, the game feels like just another console port and I cannot justify giving it a high gameplay score. I might get a lot of hate mail from rabid fanboys, but nobody ever said this job would be easy.

Graphics

Graphically speaking, Enter the Matrix is all over the map. On the plus side are the nice looking character models and sharp (if empty feeling) environments. Ghost and Niobe are well animated with the exception of their running, which I will get into in a second. The levels are well designed but feel spartan and for a console game, the graphics are nice. Too bad this is the PC version and nothing was done to take advantage of what the PC can do. The game creators boast about how they have motion captured hundreds of martial arts moves, but to be honest I was unable to spot more then a dozen or so. The character movement is very fluid and this game does a very passable job of simulating a real hand-to-hand encounter as presented in the matrix movies. But if they are going to motion capture the actors doing martial arts moves, why not spend a few more minutes in the studio and capture them running? Ghost�s run animation borders on hilarious and makes a mockery of the effort put into the fighting animation. Niobe�s run is a little less laughable but both would do well as bit players in Monty Python�s ministry of silly walks.

The weapons effects are also well done, especially in bullet time, watching a stream of 9mm bullets tear into a group of bad guys at walking speed really puts you in the playing mood. But it pales beside a game that was made a couple of years ago. Play a gun battle in Max Payne and then play one in Enter the Matrix and tell me you don�t feel let down.

The biggest beef I have with this game is the wheels. I am not sure if it is just issues with my GF3 card, but 80-90% of the time, the wheels appear as squares. I am not the only person to experience this and it is a major letdown in the graphics department. This is completely unacceptable in a $20 value game, let alone a $50-60 game. It�s almost like they left the wheels to the last minute and rather then delay shipping out the game a couple of hours late, they stuck big blocks on the car axles. No wonder Niobe�s car handles like a lego racer.

Sound/Music

If you like the sound during the action sequences in the first two movies, then you will be pleased with the game. The music is scripted into the levels so when the going gets tough, at least you can rock out to the movies theme music, it makes enduring an unstoppable beating by agents almost bearable. The weapon sounds are good, especially in bullet time. With some good speakers you can sink right into the game during the fights. The only real complaint I have about the sound is during the Logo�s missions. The exploding sentinel sound sounds like it was ripped from a 2-bit sound sample cd. But it�s a minor annoyance and does little to detract from the overall effort put into the game in the sound department.

Funfactor

Although there is no real multiplayer action as PC gamers know it, I bought this game fully expecting a single player experience and I was not disappointed� for the first three or four hours. The novelty of beating up police officers and throwing agents off rooftops starts to wear a little thin after a while. Although the environments change, the missions all have the same feel to them.

The hacking feature increases the replay value of this title substantially but there is little else to make me really jump up and say �Whoa, this game kicks ass!� The frustrating controls and camera angles really put a damper on the fun. This is a good console game, it�s just a shame they made it a straight port to the PC. To be honest, after playing for eight hours I was ready to die. Okay, maybe not die but I had the incredible urge to drive rusty nails into my eyes and pry my kneecaps off with a rusty spoon. A little harsh that may have been, but I spent $60 cdn on this and really wanted it to be something special.

Plasmafactor/Closing Remarks

Like watching the 2nd Matrix movie, I was a left with the feeling that I had been cheapened by the experience of playing Enter the Matrix. It�s not that I don�t like the Matrix, the first movie and the concept behind the trilogy is mind-boggling. It was the fact that I was looking forward to playing the game a long time, just to be let down with a game that could have been something incredible but came out feeling like a lacklustre effort.

When playing this game I couldn�t help but shake the feeling that Max Payne ruined Enter the Matrix for me. Max Payne�s lush environments and bullet time gunplay are still superior to that of Enter the Matrix. Although I tried not to compare the two games it quickly became apparent that I had played a similar and much better game more then two years ago. If the developers had taken some more time to see the level of detail that PC gamers have come to expect, this game could and would have gotten a much higher score. A great concept and storyline go halfway to making a great game and that is what I felt like after playing Enter the Matrix. I bought half a game and thus I award Enter the Matrix a plasma factor of 5.

I think I will go download a two-year-old Matrix mod for Max Payne and play what Enter the Matrix should have been�