Sure, Half-Life was unquestionably good, but Sin represents one of my fondest nostalgic gaming memories. Granted, the storyline wasn’t quite epic in proportions, but I thought the overall presentation of the game was really cool. From the action-packed, intense, and even inhumane situations Blade was thrust into, to the unique art-style, cool weapons, and even occasional implementation of vehicular action, Sin was one of the more revolutionary titles for it’s time. Aside from a brief anime spin-off however (one which I never quite verified the turn-out for), the series was never taken much further than its first initial foray… until now. Taking advantage of Valve’s bold new content delivery system, Ritual Entertainment has been hard at work to deliver one of the first high-profile episodic action titles, coinciding quite nicely with the impending release of Half Life 2: Episode One. But is Emergence worth the $19.95 charge for fans of the original, wishing to see the classic gameplay brought up to modern standards?

Just taking the price alone into account, I’m more than inclined to put forth a resounding “yes”. While the game is also out in a retail DVD format, I elected to go with the Steam route just for the sake of convenience. Ordering the online package, I found that lumped into the price was also a copy of the original Sin, along with a multiplayer variant designed to be played online. The DVD retail package also includes this, but I found it incredibly cool having direct access to the original game like this as just an easy download away, in a format that ran flawlessly on my modern configuration, serving as a very convenient means to get caught up on the events of the original game (which I had not played in years). This segued nicely into my first boot-up of Emergence once it had finished downloading.

Taking place four years after the ending of the first game, Emergence has Colonel John Blade (commander of the “Hardcorps” security force) surprisingly still locked in a fierce battle with the “SiNTEK” corporation. In spite of the events, bloodshed, and evidence of corruption and experimentation uncovered previously, SiNTEK is still going strong, and local law enforcement agencies and legal loopholes are resulting in a complete failure of bringing neither SiNTEK nor its deceitfully beautiful CEO Elexis Sinclaire to justice. Thanks to this, John (or “Blade” as he is more commonly known) decides that hefting his trademark M90 Magnum and using it to cut down hired goons en-masse would be the most direct solution to take Elexis down.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. Thankfully Ritual has taken some extra steps to implement a certain measure of intrigue into the storyline. Without giving away too much, Blade actually starts the game waking up on an operating table, with Elexis and a new character, Viktor Radek, grinning smugly over him. Blade has been injected with an experimental drug developed by Elexis to ‘enhance’ his abilities and twist him to his own end, but before her nefarious plot can be completed, Blade’s new companion, Jessica Cannon makes an appearance to bust Blade out of the facility. Following an intense shoot-out, Blade and Jessica escape the facility and begin a quest to determine what exactly Blade had been shot up with, and how it can be reversed.

If there was one thing I found myself slightly disliking as I began playing the game, it was the fact that the game engine’s origins in Half-Life 2 feel a little too pronounced. All of the cutscenes are done from the first person with a “silent” Blade, making for a slightly jarring change of pace for those expecting a presentation on par with the original game. It’s not game-breaking or anything, and Blade does still cut in with the occasional quip or line throughout the missions, but I was really surprised not to hear more of him during the scripted events, and I felt having more Blade-talk would’ve made for a better experience given the focus Sin is known for.

This aside however, Emergence is effectively a run-and-gun shooter in the truest sense. The main focus on the game is of course in the act of killing, but clever scripting and design elements have been implemented to keep this aspect interesting. Most notable are the enemy tactics - While I’m guessing the technology is based on a variation of the same AI scripting that powered Half-Life 2’s Combine soldiers, this is hardly a bad thing. Enemies will communicate, co-ordinate, and team up to try and take the player down, and this often forced me to continually re-think my strategy and take full advantage of the game’s environments to make it through an engagement in one piece. Weapon damage and enemy healthy values are also skewed to a realistic degree, so you can expect to pop enemies with only one or two headshots – but depending on your difficulty level, the same can also apply to you. This makes it all the more important to try and nail a group of enemies charging out of a door with a conveniently-placed grenade, before they have a chance to spread out and really start causing headaches. I found it particularly cool however being able to attack enemies from beneath and shoot their legs out, and then watch as they crawled around shooting at me while screaming “OH GOD I CAN’T GET BACK UP!” Locational damage is also fully functional and visible in the game, so shotgun fanatics will truly have the chance to enjoy their kills as heads and body parts are shredded by their gunfire. There’s also a cool ‘mutagen’ element, where players can invoke a limited bullet-time enhancement if they run their character through leaky clouds of toxin (a plot element I’m sure will be described in further detail in future episodes).

Interestingly, Emergence only incorporates three weapons. You get Blade’s trademark Magnum, which is usually enough to take down enemies in one or two headshots (but requires very careful aim and precision), and also comes with an uber-powerful single-shot alt-fire, which fires a specialized type of bullet found in limited quantities. Second up is the expected shotgun, which is good for both shooting, as well as smacking enemies in the face with its melee attack. Meanwhile, the alternative firing disperses a scattering of shells that can bounce around corners and flay anything in their path. And finally, an assault rifle is provided for the later parts of the game, offering an enhanced zoom feature as well an under-slung room-clearing grenade launcher. The weapons at first glance seem pretty generalized, but the fact that there are only three of them makes their usage a lot more tactical and interesting. The team also added a nifty “iron sights” button that can be used to aim a weapon with additional precision for those particularly tricky shots. Finally, for the ultimate in sadistic entertainment, Blade can also pick up a number of incendiary grenades to toss on the off-hand, which work very nicely at either flushing out enemy positions, or just watching hapless scientist NPCs run around flailing their arms wildly.

All of this meshes together to make for an exciting and consistently challenging singleplayer campaign. One of the most hyped features, in fact, is an adjustable and dynamic difficulty system that adapts to the player’s given style. When starting a new game, players are given the option to choose an overall difficulty threshold given their available skill, along with a second slider to determine how quickly the game will start scaling things back if things start getting hard. Even if I were not briefed on this feature before-hand, I still would have noticed its implementation. Every time I encountered a particularly rough part of the game forcing me to reload a quicksave time and time again, I started to notice that not only was enemy placement slightly different (maybe a co-incidence), but also that the items they dropped gradually changed to give me what I needed the most. I’d say based on this that the system certainly works pretty good overall, although I was of the impression that Half-Life 2 has some similar implementations, albeit without any degree of customization to it.

The only major shortcoming to Emergence lies purely as a fault in the episodic format – which means you get a lot of really cool gameplay stuffed into a tiny package that can be beaten in the better part of a day. The scripting and production values are effectively top-notch for the most part (though the cartoon-styled HUD took some getting used to) and I especially enjoyed the – sadly brief – sequence where you could hop in the back of a car and move between the different seats while shooting out the sides, but ultimately it’s just over way too quickly. The inclusion of the original Sin helped round off the $20 value, but this is a novelty specific to the current episode, and I feel additional effort will need to be made in expanding the future releases to make them fully worth the investment (and we definitely need more Blade-talk).

Anybody who was a major fan of the original Sin should pick this up unquestionably, as while the lack of the usable computer terminals (another beef of mine) is disappointing, everything else that made the original Sin feel like a cool and unique title for it’s time is still present in Emergence. There are also promises of adding in some new features and multiplayer content (free of charge) in the future, but for now, Sin Episodes: Emergence does offer a decent first glance at how episodic content can be worth a good value for the experience it offers, and I’m anticipating seeing how this pans out for future releases, and if it truly will be worth the ultimate investment in owning the entire series. You can find out more about this first episode by visiting www.sinepisodes.co . – Dave VanDyke.