SiN

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Review: SiN

Content is stronger than execution. Similar to Quake add-on Scourge of Armagon's levels, the levels Col. John Blade crosses in nonromantic pursuit of buttock-breasted SiNTek CEO Elexis Sinclaire are grounded in the familiar: a bank, abandoned buildings, a construction site, an old subway system, a dam, and so on.

It's nice to have nonsplattering interactions with characters-hostages, hobos, or lesser lights in the SiNTek plot-and to be encouraged to draw distinctions between operatives and innocents. The little interactive gadgets like pay phones and ATMs are pleasant distractions, though they seem to have been designed more as attention-getters than as an integral part of the game. It's nice to be able to jump into a bulldozer or recreational vehicle-though the handling via mouse is mite dicey-and to see the game through different eyes.

The level design starts out just so-so but gets better-reaching its peak in those involving water. (A rigorous undersea level is as good as anything I've played in a first-person shooter.) Multiplay is every bit as slick as you'd expect it to be in a game based on the Quake II engine.

However, the story is threadbare, the radio patter between Blade and sidekick J.C. just irritating, Blade's own running commentary a very pale Duke imitation, and the Frederick's of Hollywood model at SiN's center a dull enemy.

And the game, while impressive in places, only rarely feels special. Then again, it's hard to gauge what it might feel like if it performed more reliably. In technical terms, SiN is a mess. It took as long as 80 seconds to load a saved game on a 450MHz Pentium II with a fast SCSI 3 hard disk. Given the fact that you'll die frequently and constantly operate at less than full health, these seconds add up quickly, and it wasn't long before I started to look for more productive use of my time.

Restored games on one level started with the whole screen either used as a graphic "brush" or bouncing wildly. The sound cut out with an error report while opening a door on another. The game crashed repeatedly on the Containment Area 57 level. Enemies and even bullets occasionally appeared through walls. The intro sequences to certain levels didn't display properly. Other levels appeared to load twice.

Scripted events sometimes meshed poorly with reality. At the start of one later level, enemy rockets destroyed a hummer. Trouble is, I'd already shot down the guy manning the rocket-firer: thus, the rockets were fired from nowhere. My scuba gear simply disappeared from Inventory in one underwater level-apparently because it didn't fit in with the level's concept-only to return in the next. And my character frequently got stuck on scenery.

And even when SiN does something right-as it does with artificial intelligence (the scores of enemies routinely flee and take cover)-it doesn't do it consistently. The bosses don't seem to have any AI at all. Some of these problems will be fixed in a patch that will likely be out when you read this.

Eventually, I did what I should've done a dozen levels earlier: written it off as another promiSiNg game that was apparently rushed out the door to hit a holiday deadline.

That's the real SiN.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro