Singularity (Activision; PC, PS3, Xbox 360; rated mature)

You might like Singularity if you enjoyed BioShock but wished it had better guns and uglier enemies, and you long for the days when Russians were evil and, for the most part, named Boris or Natasha.

You might not like Singularity if you’ve been playing a lot of Killzone 2, Crysis, or some other exceptionally good-looking game lately, or if you’ll gnaw off your own fingers if you’re forced to collect one more “audio diary” in this lifetime.

Singularity is a sci-fi first-person shooter, which takes place in a rusty, leaky, and long-abandoned military complex. The story revolves around secret Russian research, a mysterious and powerful element called E99, time travel, genetic experiments, and circumstances gone horribly awry. I know, I know—it usually goes so well in stories when scientists play God. But as you progress through the game, you’ll pass through rips in the space-time fabric, hopping between 1955 and 2010, and distressingly, in both eras, lots of people and mutants want to kill you.

It’s not all just gunplay though. It’s got an aesthetic—the retro Russian propaganda films and artifacts you find scattered through the game are produced with humour and style—as well as an atmosphere. Sometimes it’s downright creepy, with its dripping water and echoes. I played the entire thing gripped with the feeling that something disgusting was about to grab onto my face.

The graphics are a step down from the better-looking shooters out there. My very first observation was everything looks kind of flat—there aren’t enough shadows or texture details.

But then, over the course of the next several hours, I came to better understand Singularity’s deal; it offers variety, does many things well, and contains enough pleasant surprises to make it worth a gamer’s time.

Specifically, the adventuring and puzzling elements in Singularity, which may seem fairly elementary when compared to those in puzzle and adventure games, suddenly seem pretty awesome when you hold them up against those in other shooters.

Also, the guns feel great, and the gore is particularly creative—I remember cutting a mutant in half with a shotgun blast, leaving just its legs standing there. They continued running toward me for a second or so. Sweet.

As far as adventure elements are concerned, the most likely (read: obvious) source of inspiration is BioShock—you’re seeing through your character’s eyes, you’ve got a gun on the right and a crazy, possessed hand on the left, you fight and manipulate objects using a combination of weapons and genetically-enhanced abilities, and you collect audio logs and explore an unfamiliar, mostly abandoned environment, attempting to piece together just what the fuck is going on.

But BioShock really only had fetch-quests; there wasn’t much puzzling to speak of. And puzzles are really Singularity’s unique selling proposition.

Using your left-hand TMD (Time Manipulation Device) you’ll be constantly aging and de-aging objects—making them shiny and new, or decayed and crumbly—to manipulate the environment to your advantage; for example, zap a broken crate and restore it to shape to give yourself a step up, or reduce the enemy’s cover to rubble. The puzzles themselves are not especially difficult, but they’re challenging enough to make you stop and switch from your solider hat to your explorer hat now and then. As a shooter, Singularity stands alone there.

Chris Vandergaag is a Vancouver-based freelancer. When he's not gaming, writing, or forwarding links of questionable moral repute, he's asleep.