Previews
A mysterious accident gives you superhero-like powers, and a foreboding world to use them in.
 By Matt Leone 02/19/2009
When I hear the phrase "time control shooter," my mind splits between Sierra's TimeShift and the generic bullet time mode in almost every other shooter. One was gimmicky, and the other couple-hundred were slightly less fun each time the idea was recycled. The pitch to differentiate Singularity, then, isn't that it uses time control, but how. Developer Raven Software essentially treats the time control concept like a superhero power -- rather than give you one mode to flip on and off, it takes the base skill, and branches it off into various related abilities.
Ask Raven studio head Brian Raffel about TimeShift and he'll give you a rehearsed answer, but one that gets right to what makes his game different: "TimeShift is only about rewinding and advancing time. [Singularity] is about picking up individual objects and using them in different states to add puzzle elements, combat, [and] story."
 Click the image above to check out all Singularity screens.
Early in Singularity's story -- after your plane crashes into an island, but before you figure out why alien-like enemies are after you -- you meet a character who gives you a Time Manipulation Device (TMD). It looks like a magical glove, and, as the name suggests, presents you with your temporal control powers. Specifically, the TMD allows you to find things to interact with, lift objects without gravity affecting them, shine a flashlight that lets you see messages written on walls in the past, age objects to turn them into their future-selves, or revert objects back to the state they were in hundreds of years ago.
So, say you see an old, broken-down canister on the other side of a fence. If you pick it up and use your age/revert power to transform it into a brand new (and freshly explodable) canister, you can then use it to blow through an obstacle. If you come across a locked door, you can age it so far ahead that the lock disintegrates. If you notice a fuse box electrocuting a pool of water you need to cross, you can age the wiring to stop the electricity.
Raffel is quick to point out that these abilities also work in combat. You can "age the framing" of a crate off in the distance to make it fall on your opponents. Or, if you don't have much ammo and want to take on an enemy, you can simply age them to the point of death (though this works slower than shooting them). You have other ways to bend time to your will besides just sending objects into the future, though, such as creating a bubble shield that freezes time within it. You can use it as cover, or toss an explosive into it and then shut down the shield when enemies are nearby, effectively creating a remote mine. In some cases, you can even bring enemies back from the dead to attack everything around them and do some of your work for you.
 Click the image above to check out all Singularity screens.
Conveniently, the game places restrictions on what you can alter in the world, explained in the story by "the Singularity event," -- a mysterious accident that happened back in 1950. "When they had this Singularity event, some stuff got hit with E-99 material and some not," says Raffel. "And that's the stuff that can be manipulated through time." In some cases, you can affect large parts of the environment, similar to Battlefield: Bad Company -- though not to nearly as extreme a degree. But, generally, you can't change the base elements that keep level structures together.
Related to the "mysterious accident," Singularity takes place in two time periods. You start in 2010 during the plane crash, but the game moves you back and forth between then and 1950. Later, you earn the ability to move between the two time periods at will. This will, naturally, play into puzzles such as having to trigger something in the past to create a path in the future. Trying to sum the game up, you could make the Lost comparison: plane goes down and you find yourself on a mysterious island. Or the BioShock one: plane goes down and you get magical abilities in your left hand. Or even the TimeShift one -- no plane, but semi-similar gameplay ideas. But from what I've seen so far, Singularity doesn't feel like it's trying to directly channel any one of those; instead, it pulls influences from all over. In a presentation given by Raffel, I noticed traditional military combat, alien-looking creatures popping out of the side of walls, a horror scene where you stumble upon a pilot hanging dead and bloody on a wall, electricity-charged environments, time travel, a boss fight in an western setting, and a scene where you raise a giant tanker out of the water and then go exploring through it. Basically, a lot of things you wouldn't think traditionally go together. All that, along with time control, is what looks to make Singularity different. |
