Enter the Matrix

Added August 11th, 2003 by EminaZ

Introduction:

Now days, the movie industry and the videogame industry work together in order to bring the movies into life by allowing a person to be in control of one of the main characters in that movie. Movies like the Lion King, Spiderman, X-Men, The Hulk, and many more, all have their respective game. Although some of those movies build up an audience by earlier videogames. For example, there have been well over 20 X-men games in videogame history.

Enter the Matrix, developed by Shiny, is without a doubt going to become one of the fastest selling videogames in recent history, as it is a game to the blockbuster Matrix: Reloaded, a sequel to the 1999 blockbuster hit The Matrix. While holding the Matrix title alone would make this a hit, releasing this game on various, four to be exact, medians would make this title a bigger hit. Enter the Matrix is being released on Nintendo’s GameCube, Sony’s PlayStation 2, PC, and, of course, Microsoft’s own Xbox. This way, the game could reach anyone who is interested in picking it up.

Gameplay:

Enter the Matrix, unlike its movie counterpart, doesn’t shatter the gaming world with its ground breaking innovation. People who played Max Payne will see some similarities between the game, although not much. The special effects are actually kind of outdated, although it is pretty. Games like BloodRayne, Max Payne, and even Perfect Dark all use the slow-motion time effect.

While the main character in the movie, The Matrix: Reloaded, is Neo, played by the talented Keanu Reeves; in the game, he make almost no appearance and instead of controlling him, you are subjected to pick either Niobe or Ghost (played by Jada Pinkette-Smith and Anthony Wong, respectively). Your mission is to find out what happened to the last transmission of the ship Osiris. Perhaps a reason of why Neo wasn’t a selectable character is because you get to play the missions Niobe and Ghost are subjected to finish while Neo and Trinity accomplish their missions, and some of the missions actually hold out some relevance to the actual movie. Your mission is drawn out if you lay an easier mode, you will have an arrow on the top center of your screen telling you of where to go. If you are playing the hardest mode, you will have to depend on yourself; which in turn gets you lost more often then not. Not knowing where to go doesn’t make a game harder, but it make it more frustrating.

As you can seen in the picture, you have two bars to keep you from dying. The “Focus” bar and the “Health” bar. The focus bar allows you to do cool Matrix-like moves, it allows you kick-in doors, walk on walks, jump higher, see the bullets coming at you, and many more useful gizmos. Your health bard is pretty self explanatory, all you need to know is that if it runs out, you die. But worry your little hearts not, if you used up all of your focus and have only 1% health left, then you are not necessary dead. All you do to get your focus and health back up is stand in a corner that is safe for a second or two. You will see your bars quickly recovering. This makes the game so easy, combat wise, no matter how you look at it.

Graphics:

The graphics look better in screenshots then in actual gameplay. A sentence that could be written on such few games. While the character models actually look like their respective actor, the whole feel of this game is rather past generation. And aside from the character models, the game could be handled by Sega’s own Dreamcast.

Some stages use fog as an excuse for the environments low texture and overall grainy look. Most of the stages have many pop-ups (No, not those annoying internet pop-ups. Pop-ups in videogame terms means that object just appear out of no where.), lack texture, and has repetitive texture. This comes to no surprise, however, a developer would need to find common grounds across all the 4 medians (Xbox, GC, PS2, and PC) in order to make development faster and get the game out in time.

The graphics are unimpressive for being an Xbox game. The best thing about the graphics are the character models. Sadly, there are many graphical glitches and animation breaks that just don’t contribute to the graphics of the game, but simply take away.

Audio:

The best thing about this game is the sound. Even though I am using the superlative “best” doesn’t mean that the sound is going to shatter your ears because of the crystal clear sound or anything. However, it is indeed the best.

The game features some nice sound effects and are accompanied by some techno-based musical scores. All contribute to the lacking feeling of actually being in the matrix. The sound does indeed support the famous Dolby 5.1 surround sound support, which is an excellent addition to the sound. The biggest downside to the sound and music is how, randomly, sound effects feel that they could, magically, change the volume and thus making it louder then the original. music.

Controls:

It takes a bit getting use to, but the controls are decent. You have very little flexibility over how to work the controls as the controller isn’t mappable. Shiny gives you 3 choices on how you want to your control. Controlling the focus could be a bit awkward in mode B & C can feel horrid because not many games take advantage of the click-able thumbsticks, thus making it feel weird. The camera is static so you can’t change it upon demand, you are stuck with it so you must learn to master it.

Then there is the horrific 1st person mode, which you probably are going to ignore as there is no true reason to use it. It is a nightmare to use and even a bigger nightmare to explain. To put in simple words, lets just say that you aren’t prepared to force yourself to change the use of the analogs back and forth without getting confused.

Replay Value:

Not much incentive is given to replay the whole game again. However, one could play the short, yet fun “Hacking” game. In this game, you are presented with an on screen keyboard and a small GUI (Graphical User Interface). The whole thing is strikingly similar to MS-DOS or even Linux. You get to try to hack a rival computer system, and in which are rewarded with some treats. You could, for example, view profiles on all of the oppositions, view all guns in the game, view all FMV’s, and many other goodies about the game. But first you have to advance by “hacking” the information. You would have to find passwords, use detective work and be sharp and paranoid of all information given to you as they might be used again. You get to hear a short message from Neo. You could also unlike Training Mode and Battle mode. Both are interesting to use. In battle mode you could fight a friend, what bad about it is that you can’t actually pick your characters, the fight is predetermined. They already picked your opponent and the stage, the only thing left is who is going to win. Not the best fighting game, but good for an extra.

Summary:

Is this game the perfect game to a perfect movie? No. But it is the only Matrix game available on the market. If you want to play an average looking, an average sounding game, that features the cool characters of the Matrix then this game is for you. If you are a Max Payne or Blood Rayne fan, then you will probably like this game also. Let this be a lesson learned, don’t hype a game simply because of the name it contains. This game could be a nice rental if you are into action paced games.