Enter the Matrix

Customer reviews:

almost a waste of money, 2006-07-21
pros:
-cool moves
-have some deleted scenes of the movie
-use "Hacking", to get more features(such as getting new messages)
cons:
-a waste of space!4 cds, 4 GBS!
- the controlls are complex
- the mouse sensitivty are different ( the speed of selecting sometime is different from viewing and sniping)
- the graphic sucks and everything is all dark
-sometime the game froze at the menu

i play alot of games and when i read about how EtM sucks, i thought, how bad can it be? well its the worst i hav ever seen.
its almost a rip off of the game "Max payne". if you get a chance to buy this game, PASS ON THAT!

Overhyped, 2006-01-27
I have to say this is probably the most overhyped game ever released and in no way did it live up to the hype generated before its release, which only made things worse.

Sure, the graphics are good and it has a lot of features. The problem is that the developers of this game neglected the most important aspect of gaming - GAMEPLAY. Let's face it, the game has great graphics but it's not fun to play. It's way to linear and the fighting and shooting system is very poorly designed with unnecessary features. If a game doesn't have good gameplay, then graphics, features, special effects and all that other nonsense means squat. It doesn't matter how realistic it looks or how many moves you can do, if the game is not fun to play then it's not worth buying. Even if a game's graphics look almost the same as real life, I would rather play an old 8-bit NES game if the new game has no gameplay and isn't fun to play.

It seems the developers of this game just hopped on the "let's spend 5 years on the graphics and features and completely neglect the gameplay" bandwagon that so many other developers are following nowadays. It didn't seem like they were trying to make a good game, it seemed more like they were trying to impress people with all the features and graphics and just create a lot of hype to deceive people into going out and buying a useless manufactured game. They wasted way too much time with unnecessary features instead of spending it on actually making the game bearable to play.

I remember off the Matrix DVD (I can't remember which one) in the features it had a preview of the making of the game and there was this woman bragging about how "This game is like no other, each character has over 300 individual moves, it has fighting, it has shooting, it has driving" or some cr*p like that (this is partly what I mean about hype).

1) What's the point of each character having "over 300 individual moves" if all you need to do to get through the game is a normal punch and kick? Normally, the purpose of special moves is to make it easier or quicker to defeat the enemy. However, in this game, just using normal moves is just as efficient as using special ones due to the poor design of the fighting system. I did many special moves during the game and I saw no benefit in doing them. In fact I found it easier just using normal punches and kicks or just pressing random buttons to get through the game and lost even less health using this method. Now why would a player remember the combinations to do all these special moves if there is no incentive to do them? So basically, all those hours that the developers spent on programming all these 300 moves amounts to nothing since the player is not even going to use 90% of them throughout the whole game. This game would have gotten a much higher rating if all those hours were spent on more simple and fundamental aspects of the game.

2) The driving is terrible. It's not what they hyped it up to be. There is rarely driving in the game and when there is it's pretty average and arcade style. I don't feel that I have to write much more on this aspect as most people who have played the game will agree. If you want good driving, then buy Gran Turismo or NFS.

3) Don't even get me started on the shooting. This has to be the absolute WORST aspect of the game and probably the worst shooting engine in any game for that matter. This aspect completely put me off the game. If it wasn't for this then I probably would have actually bothered to beat it. I mean, for Christ's sake, WHERE'S THE CROSSHAIR??? The default mode is 3rd person and you don't even have a crosshair to aim with (and it's not even an option). HOW THE HELL ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO AIM? It's simply way too hard to aim at someone in 3rd person without a crosshair. Sure, they have an "auto-aim" feature when you shoot in the enemy's general direction, that is, if your idea of auto-aim is bullets going 5 meters off target in random directions. I mean, I'm sitting there trying to shoot a simple guard, trying to aim in his general direction without the aid of a crosshair, emptying clips of bullets that just fly off in random directions anywhere apart from the enemy, the bullets looking like something off a playstation game. The only way to get a crosshair on the bloody screen is going into 1st person mode. Sure, that sounds alright. I mean, I'll just go into 1st person mode every time I see an enemy. But guess what? You can't even move in 1st person mode, which just makes it impossible to avoid being shot. And you know what else? For some unknown reason the developers decided to make the mouse around 50x more sensitive in 1st person mode than it is in 3rd person. Way to encourage people to aim. And you can't even change the sensitivity for 1st person mode alone so it will always be around 50x more sensitive than in 3rd person mode. And when you change it so that you can actually aim at someone in less than 1 minute in 1st person mode, it becomes so un-sensitive in 3rd person mode that it takes around 10 movements of the mouse across the mouse pad just to do a 360. In the end, it just gets to the point where it's easier to just run up to someone and kung-fu them. Due to its fundamental flaws, this aspect of the game ends up as useless as the "300 moves" I mentioned earlier. Once again, there is no incentive to use this aspect of the game. Why would someone sit there for 1 minute, emptying 5 clips of bullets just to kill a few enemies, when he/she could just run up to them and kung-fu them and kill them even quicker and with even less loss of health. Personally, I can't understand why the developers would spend so much time on designing 300 moves that the player is not even going to use and not even making an effort to fix the fundamental aspects of the game. I mean, surely the developers could have spent a couple of hours placing a simple crosshair on the screen, adjusting the mouse sensitivity and actually programming the bullets to hit their targets.

Overall, it seems that the developers tried to mix a few different genres of gaming but got none of them right. Also the gaming is way too linear. I mean, I've played plenty of linear games and enjoyed them (eg. Medal of Honor series) but this game takes it to a whole new level and just becomes plain boring. The whole game is pretty much based on running through and area, killing all the guards in it and going through a door to the next area. There is hardly any variation to this. No finding keys/items, no exploring areas, no secrets, just the same old linear path with fighting the same old enemies.

So in conclusion, the developers spend a lot of time on unnecessary features and graphics but this was not enough to save the game as it is fundamentally flawed in the crucial area of gameplay. The game mixes a wide range of gaming genres but fails to succeed in any of them, once again, due to poor gameplay. If the developers spent a little less time on ridiculously unnecessary features and a little more on the crucial area of gameplay this could have very well been a solid release. Unfortunately, it just became another poor movie-adaptation to add to the ever growing list.