I bought the Enter the Matrix video game, and I have to say that aside from whatever other qualities the game might have, it combines two of my least favorite things: a third-person perspective with a really clunky camera system, and the inability to save any where, any time.
The first of these is aggravating — you start fighting in the game and all of a sudden the camera swings around by some weird dictate of the code, and you have no clue where you are or what you’re doing. Hint to game developers, since I know there’s at least one of you who reads this: Nail the friggin’ camera down during fighting. A wildly swinging camera does not help me kick my opponent’s ass, and when I die because my camera suddenly wants to give me a viewing perspective from behind a box, what that makes me want to do is hop on a plane to where your studios are and unload a couple of clips into your workstations.
Enter the Matrix does have a first-person setting, but it’s unbelievably bad — for one thing, when you’re in the first-person mode, you can move from side to side but you can’t move forward or backwards. Who is the idiot that thought this would be a good idea? Another note to game developers: Look, if you’re going to give me a first person mode, make it useful to me. Providing me with a lame-ass first-person mode just makes me think you’re a lame programmer who can’t even figure out how to move forward.
Second thing: I should be able to save my anywhere, anytime, whenever I want. Why? Because I paid 50 bucks for this argin’-fargin’ game to be entertained. And I will tell you what is not entertaining: Having to slog through a significant portion of a level over and over and over again just to get to the point in the level that is so poorly scripted that it does not allow me to complete my objective in a reasonable manner, thus causing the game to stop and me to begin at the beginning of the level again. I can accept that I am part of the problem here; perhaps at age 34, my mad sniping skillz are not what they used to be. However, bad game design is also part of the problem. If I could save at the moment just before I am required to do a very difficult task, I could probably live with it. But instead I have to start at the beginning, several minutes earlier.
Never tell me I shouldn’t be able to save when I want. It really is the simplest way to get me not to buy your game. I’m serious about this, incidentally — There have been games I have been slavering over that I’ve not bought because I’ve read a review that mentioned that the “save” function was not under the player’s control. It’s a deal breaker for me. I’m buying the game so I can play it, not so it can play me.
Aside from these two major issues, I have to say so far I’m really not impressed with Enter the Matrix all around. The other character controls are very clunky, the graphics on the PC are twitchy (I have a high-end processor and video card, so this shouldn’t be the case), the level design is bland and the textures are uninspiring. From a the PC gamer point of view, you can tell this game was initially design with the console player in mind, which is not always a blessing from the PC gamer point of view. All in all, mostly a disappointment so far.
The game does provide us with more scenes of the very tasty Jada Pinkett Smith as a reward for slogging through the levels, but at this point I’m tempted to use the “hack” tool that comes with the game just to watch those cinematic scenes and skip the rest of the game altogether. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the game.