Review by: Jeff McAllister

The ability to make an object age right in front of your eyes, be it an inanimate object or a living being, is something that would give the wielder stunning power. Singularity, the new shooter from developer Raven Software, does in fact give you this ability, although it’s not used quite how you might expect.

You take the role of a soldier named Nathaniel Renko, who is sent in to investigate a radiation anomaly within Russia on a small island known as Katorga-12. You and your partner – voiced by the video game everyman Nolan North -end up crash landing and find that the island is inhabited by some ghoulish creatures and a woman named Kathryn who works for an organization called MIR-12. Once you spend some time on the island using conventional weapons (pistols, shotgun and assault rifles) to mow down said creatures, you eventually come to acquire the Time Manipulation Device or the TMD as it is known. The TMD gets strapped to your wrist and allows you to interact with items created out of E99. E99 – not Egg - is an element that was excavated back in the fifties by the Russians and is only found on Katorga-12, but after an incident, - known as a Singularity - the facility was shut down and the E99 forgotten. That is until a scientist name Demichev decided to restart the time manipulation experiments to use the power for himself and his own agenda.

The core of the game centers on time and is featured in many facets. You spend much of the game travelling back and forth between 2010 and 1955 where the scenery and atmosphere change each time you switch from a desolate wasteland to a functioning, lively, science facility. In the present, you’ll find scrawled notes left behind on walls that give you warnings about what you are doing and what is to come, while you are also given glimpses from time to time of an overlapping faded past to show what happened in certain areas.

The TMD itself gives you multiple powers over the course of the game; the first and main power allows you to change the age of objects. A cool idea that quickly becomes a one trick pony, which is unfortunate with all the possibilities that such a device offers. You are able to use it on humans which ages them to dust, and it has different effects on creatures—like causing them to explode.