SiN Episodes 1 - Emergence – First Play

Episodic gaming is something that I’ve heard talked about but it isn’t something that I’ve had the chance to try. It seems to offer several benefits to both game consumers and game producers. For us the consumer, there is the benefit of getting more of what we like more often – regularly produced expansion packs could be one way to think of it, and for a busy gamer the ability to purchase bite-sized pieces of gaming entertainment a chunk at a time. Obviously for the producer the desired benefit is more money for less investment, with the possibility of more regular income from a popular season of game episodes. Instead of being expected to create an entirely new game from the ground up, they can focus on creating new content.

Emergence is the first episode in Ritual’s Sin Episodes line-up, and I picked it up for a pretty reasonable price. I heard that it was a fairly honest shoot-em-up FPS with a focus on gameplay and it sounded like something fun to occupy a couple hours of my leisure time. Unfortunately, my first impression after taking the game home was not very positive. I was more than a little surprised when I opened the DVD case and found only a single slip of paper titled “Quick Reference Card” with no manual or other material beside the DVD itself. On the plus side, if you purchase it online you won’t be missing anything

I load the game on my machine and after verifying and decrypting through Steam I start a new game. I see one of the features presented immediately: The Personal Challenge System. I set how quickly I want the challenge to ramp up, and how quickly I want the game to provide assistance if I get stuck, both sliders set in the dead center. This is supposed to be one of the selling points of the game, and I’m excited to see if it’s true that after a ream of head-shots that soldiers will start sporting bullet proof helmets. Ok I’m ready; let the action start!

The game starts with a short cinematic with me strapped into a hospital bed of some sort, staring up at two people who are hunched over me. From the conversation it sounds like I’m face to face with my nemesis and her henchman. I can only assume this as I have never played the original Sin, and they haven’t explained any back-story – who I am, who these people are, anything at all really. The important point is that I am injected with something nasty. I am then quickly rescued by an attractive lady sidekick and spirited away in a car. But I am not taken back to home base. Instead, I am dropped off at an enemy facility and told to start hunting for the guy that injected me.

Thrown into the world with a pistol and no directions, the only thing to do is to move in whichever direction is not blocked, and proceed to shoot everything that moves. There are no innocent people, very little apparent option in terms of where to go, and I don’t really know what I’m doing. Still, there lots of neat interactive things like exploding barrels, air tanks that fly around after being shot, and glass that shatters after being shot. And the enemies are fun to shoot in different locations. Taking out their knees, headshots, a quick pistol-whip across the face, it’s all in good fun and I’m not distracted from my destructive ways by complicated things like plot or motive.

I suddenly notice that there was no annoying “intro” level teaching me how to jump… or is there… it just isn’t in my face training, which is nice, and I notice that the game lets me bypass this intro level (where I don’t have a gun) for future gaming sessions so that I can get directly into the action.

As previously mentioned, I set the interactive challenge meter to the middle, and the AI doesn’t seem extraordinarily keen on killing me efficiently yet. Maybe I’m not putting up enough of a challenge for the computer to figure that it needs to throw anything fancy at me. I haven’t gone exclusively for headshots and I haven’t seen any helmets yet.

While I make my way through the corridors and chambers, I discover a couple secrets. A special chime noise goes off and the screen announces that I have found a secret. The stats menu option shows how many secrets I have found in each level out of the total for that level, much like I am used to from the original Doom. Some of the secrets involve finding an out of the way corner of an open area with a goody-filled crate, and others involve jumping down warp-pipes that expressly tell me not to jump down them. It is definitely good to see that exploration is rewarded.

The story presented to me so far is enough to give me a good pretense for shooting everything, but I don’t really know what my objectives are or where I am supposed to go. I just keep moving forward as the path allows, and killing everyone. I hope that at some point there will be a cinematic explaining more of the context behind “Blade”, the main character of the game.

Honestly, I just figured out that I’m a police officer of some sort because a lot of these bad guys are yelling at me and calling me “pig” and “cop”. Unless Blade is supposed to have amnesia, I think it would have been nice to at least have explained that much. Now I have to admit that just now after looking at the back of the box of the game I see that it says, “You’re Colonel John R. Blade, commander of the most legendary Security Force in Freeport”, but I don’t see why this basic information is omitted from the game.

Also, as I play I notice that it would have been nice to get a list of objectives and see them get crossed out as they are completed, or to be able to contact my remote team for advice or direction on demand. Unfortunately my “contact” button only does something after my team has paged me – something that only happens once I trigger a critical event in the game. Although the game is a basic FPS, there are times where I have been instructed to do something specific, like find a security panel and press a button to open or close a door, and these are the kind of things that would be nice to have noted for my reference in case I happen to leave the game for a while, come back, and forget what I was supposed to do next.

Finally I meet up with the guy who stuck me with a needle at the beginning, and from here the game changes things up a little bit. First, I am now introduced to fighting weird mutant monsters as well as enemy soldiers. Second, I’m playing with two new weapons, a shotgun and a machine gun. Third, a mini-boss and some car based fighting are thrown in which help make the playing experience more diverse.

Now having died several times up to this point, especially at the nasty mini-boss, I have come to really appreciate the great auto-restore feature. Whether from the last checkpoint, or my last quick-save, being able to continue playing right after dying is great. It definitely keeps the frustration factor very low, and lets me focus on having fun.

The graphics are good, but although the game is powered by the Source engine, they don’t stand up to the loving detail found in the well-known Source powered game Half-Life 2. The characters and some areas are well detailed, but there are a lot of very squared off areas that obviously were not treated with the same effort as other areas. However, the processing and memory demands for Emergence seem about equivalent to Half-Life 2 and unfortunately the hated load stutter from Half-Life 2 is present. Also, the game has crashed twice so far on me, something that is quite rare on my computer. Each time it happened as the game was loading a new area, but I was able to continue from the saved checkpoint without any problems after launching the game again.

Before I conclude my second session, I manage to escape from the laboratory I was fighting in and get picked up by my sidekick. After some drive by shooting and hit-and-runs we stop at my nemesis’s skyscraper and it is here that I decide to take a break. I’m eager to pick this up again and I really hope that some kind of epiphany is lurking around the next corner that explains what the heck is going on and who Blade and his sidekicks are – see my next play rating to follow my experiences with Sin Episodes Emergence.

About the Reviewer’s System
For reference, the reviewer used an Athlon 64 3000+, 1 GB RAM, and an ATI 9600 Pro with 256 MB RAM. The game was installed with the May 17th patch.

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