Enter the Matrix

Published by Atari
Developed by Shiny Entertainment
Platform: PlayStation 2
Released - Out Now
Price : £39.99

Being released amid a wave of hype surrounding the second Matrix movie, Enter the Matrix has proved a huge marketing success and sold in excess of one million copies. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean it's a great game and it's probably more to do with excellent marketing techniques than anything else. The game is developed by Shiny Entertainment, who up to now, have been the Marmite equivalent of games developers i.e. you usually love or hate what they have created. Let's take a look at Enter the Matrix and see what it's like.

Unlike most film tie-ins Enter the Matrix actually complements the movies it is based upon. This is down to the fact that the game has been written by the Wachowski Brothers, the creators of The Matrix. Rather than simply imitating the events found in The Matrix Reloaded movie, the plot of the game has been written to act as a side plot which is certainly an impressive piece of innovation and in my opinion a much better way to do things. The game is centred on Niobe and Ghost. You can play the game as either character. The game doesn't attempt to explain what's going on too much though and as I hadn't seen The Matrix Reloaded I often found myself in the dark about what was going on but for fans of the films I don't suppose this will be a problem.

The main problem with the game is that it offers nothing different and certainly little that's inspiring. The combat and driving sequences offer nothing new and even one of the novelties from The Matrix, called Focus in the game, where you switch the action to slow motion to enable you to perform spectacular moves has already been done in Max Payne under the name of Bullet Time so while this should have appeared as a novelty it comes across as unoriginal. The absence of a tutorial is also most unwelcome but in all honesty there isn't anything complicated about the game and the AI of the enemies is nothing to worry to about.

Everything about the game is average. The graphics are definitely not the best the PlayStation 2 can offer but that's not to say that the game looks poor in anyway. The framerate is rather suspect on quite a few occasions, which is a disappointment. There are a number of graphical glitches in the game and this spoils any chance of the game looking impressive. These glitches are noticeable, more often than not, with the character shadows which I have seen flicker from time to time and on some occasions will actually take a couple of seconds to appear which looks rather comical. There are also clipping problems where you see Niobe or Ghost walk straight through dead bodies or other obstacles that are supposed to be solid objects. The animation in places is OK and in others risible. The first time I saw Ghost run it really made me laugh as his arms flail hopelessly in the air. The characters didn't run this poorly on Daley Thompson's Decathlon on the Spectrum 48k back in the 1980s.

Deaf gamers will be pleased to know that Enter the Matrix can have subtitles enabled. By default they aren't on but if you check the video options you can choose to enable the subtitles. The quality of the text provision is actually very good. Pressing the start button brings up a menu that you can recall your objectives from as well as recall any tips that have appeared on screen during the game. The game also uses icons to keep you informed. Trying to open a locked door for instance will show a red hand icon where as if the door is open the hand icon is blue. There isn't any area you could fault the game in terms of being deaf gamer friendly.

Like most film tie-ins Enter the Matrix is a third person action game where you run around participate in simple combat sequences, do a bit of this and a bit of that as the developers try and fit multiple genres into the gameplay. None of it is brilliant but on the other hand none of it is particularly bad either. As a game designed to compliment the films it does it's job and fans of the Matrix films will probably have picked this up on the day of release, which accounts for the high sales, and be reasonably happy with it. Looking at the game from a gamer's point of view though it's distinctly average in every department and for your money there's a lot better to be had than this.

Overall Game Rating: 5.0/10
It's great that the game compliments the latest film but a shame that the game has been so poorly realised.

Deaf Gamers comment:
No problems at all for deaf gamers and the text provision is superb.