Enter the Matrix

Rating:
Summary: May have to hack your way into installing it
Review: The install was very glitchy. It got though to the final disc and then asked for the first one again. When I put it in, the whole install crashed and it erased 3 CD's worth of installation. I finally got past this by pressing continue while on the final ("play") disc install the first time it asked for volume 1 and then responding normally when it asked again at the very end of the install (green bar maxed out). The support website suggests trying to just copy all the discs to your hard drive and installing from there. A DVD version of the game might work better too. Then I had to patch my video and sound cards plus the game. Got a blank screen... then tried switching the game resolution from 800x600 to 1024x768 to match my desktop and it finally worked! Gameplay was okay.. my favorite parts were the videos and the focus fighting (bullet-time) while the driving parts sucked. Still, it was nice to get some extra details of the Matrix story from the game.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Review: I've gotten only partway through 'enter the matrix', but I am totally loving the experience. It's so friggin cool to be in the matrix- so if you are a real matrix fan, get the game and have a blast!

Rating:
Summary: THIS GAME ROCK'S DUDE
Review: ENTER THE MATRIX GAME ROCK'S DUDE IM 13 AND IV PLAY'D MENY TEEN GAMES AND THIS IS THE COOLIST YOU CAN PIC FRUM (NIOBE OR GHOST)
GHOST IS MY FAVERET DUDE. NIOBE AND GHOST HAVE DIFERENT MISSINS.
IT HAS CUT SEENS FRUM THE MOVES 2 AND 3. ITS A 4 DISC SET.
COOL COMBAT FITING COOLIST GUNS MY FAVERET IS THE SHOTGUN
OUN SHOT AND YOUR ENAMY IS DAED IF YOU PUSH THE FOCAS BUTON EVRETHING IS SLOOW MOSHON YOU CAN DOGE BLITS AND WAY MORE DUDE

Rating:
Summary: Interesting story, bad game.
Review: I purchased this game with the hope of an enjoyable experience, and seeing the companion scenes filmed during The Matrix Reloaded. I'm not sure what I got out of it, but it certainly wasn't what I was expecting.

First off, this game has problems with slowdown. I don't have a top of the line system, but on a 1.2GHz machine with 768 MB of RAM and a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, I got slowdown when fighting more than one enemy, at 640X480, the lowest possible resolution to play at. At this resolution, the graphics looked terrible, but at least it was playable. I've talked to people with high-end machines & top of the line video cards that have problems getting a steady frame rate even at 800X600. Then again, I've talked to people who said the game ran great for them.

I chose to play through as Ghost, so during driving sequences, the computer drove. The driving AI is ridiculously bad. The car would ram into walls frequently, and got stuck a few times, forcing me to reload the level.

The action sequences are very linear, with an arrow that tells you exactly where you need to go.

Despite these shortcomings, I kept playing the game. I ended up cheating, just to play through the game portions and reveal more move clips and story.

The game did get better after the first 2 or 3 missions, and the convergance with Matrix Reloaded is a neat idea, but overall, it's a fairly poor game.

Rating:
Summary: Disgusting, just disgusting!
Review: Warning! Even though you're a matrix fan, and want more matrix action,just watch the movies,don't get this game.It's a total rip!The action is soooooooooooo boring, and the car driving parts of the game is just lame,very lame.But there's a bright side to this game,and it's the movie clips.

Rating:
Summary: The concept is innovative, but ultimately the game isn't
Review: If one good thing can be said about Enter the Matrix, it's that the Wachowski Brothers were a major creative force behind the game. A 244 page script and an unprecedented 60 minutes of original cinematic footage was produced so gamers and movie watchers alike could learn the story of Ghost and Niobe (played by Anthony Wong and Jada Pinkett Smith.) Their time on the big screen was limited, but their experiences in the game supplement the Matrix story and fill in gaps the movie left out. The concept is pure genius, but the finished product ends up a failure because it's just not fun to play.

From the start of the game, you get this unnerving feeling that developer Shiny Entertainment was in over their head. The game engine itself has sub-par graphics considering its high system requirements and the number of bugs are atrocious (more on that later.) I knock off another star for the bloated 3.6 gigs of hard drive space this game requires. Running music and cutscenes off the CD's could have saved a lot of space, but we're not given this option. Hard drives are cheap, but this is ridiculous.

After spending the half-hour/hour necessary to dump this behemoth on your hard drive, you'll find yourself starting out watching a movie clip involving Ghost, Niobe, and their cynical ship dwelling sidekick Sparks. The clips are faithful to the movie and, to their credit, Shiny added well done computer animated cutscenes of their own. Your first mission involves infiltrating a post office to pick up an important package. From this point, Sparks whines about the difficulty of the mission (as he does throughout the game), you choose whether you want to be Ghost or Niobe, and the game begins.

As you proceed through the post office, prompts flash on the screen which provide "tips" on performing various functions such as controlling character movement and performing special fighting moves. It would have been nice to simply hit a function key instead of Esc, select option, scroll down, select tip, etc... An extremely linear game, you're subjected to following a green arrow at the top of the screen which points which direction you should be headed, punching and kicking cops and security guards along the way. After reading twenty tips and punching and kicking 100 security guards as you follow your little green arrow, you find you have returned right back where you started. In fact, you'll run in circles three times just to complete the first level. In another level, you run from one end of a level to another to flip a switch and turn a conveyor belt on. Halfway back, you get a prompt saying someone turned the switch off. As a result you have to retrace your steps and repeat the process all over again. Other levels have you climbing staircases all the way up to the top floor of some factory, running to the other side of the room, then climbing staircases all the way back down again. This mind-numbing backtracking is a persistent problem throughout the game.

Character movement is mostly annoying. Yes, you can slow things down to the now famous bullet-time and hit special key combinations to perform cool moves, but here's the problem. It takes a lot longer to perform these moves and you're subjected to so many faceless, nameless cops and security guards that it's quicker just to run up to them and mash buttons until you knock them out and move on. Considering lost health restores automatically by standing still long enough, it's easier this way too. Even more problematic, the game tries to think for you when you've got your guns drawn and you end up firing at stuff you're not even aiming at. In one level, I was supposed to destroy three control panels. I stood pointing directly at them at point blank range while my bullets were wildly firing in every direction other than straight ahead.

Bugs are prevalent. You'll run into clipping problems (heads and arms appearing through walls) and unrealistic gameplay issues, like a door or elevator not working until you've killed every guard in the room. In one level, I got to my objective (a telephone) before everyone was eliminated and found myself completely unable to continue the game or even move away from the telephone. Best I could do was shut down and start over. Sound issues are a problem for those with EAX and cutscenes are lower in volume than the sound effects. You'll find yourself playing with the volume knob a lot. At times, the game muted my sound card for no apparent reason at all. A patch addresses some, but not all of these problems.

Most laughable are the so-called driving sequences. Pretty much the only difference between playing as Niobe or Ghost, completing these levels is an exercise in frustration. As Niobe the driver, the view is limited and the controls are sluggish. As Ghost, riding shotgun with a shotgun, Niobe's driving is so bad you're safer keeping yourself inside the vehicle. Strangest of all are the other cars on the road, violently gyrating left and right even at a complete standstill. You'd think they were filled with horny teenagers.

After about an hour of this inane running, killing, running, killing, and following the little green arrow just to watch the next cinematic, it dawns on you that that's all there is to this game. Out of sheer boredom, I entered a cheat so I could avoid the guards and get through the cinematics. Even the current Hollywood fad of girl-on-girl liplocking (Monica Bellucci and Jada Pinkett Smith) couldn't keep me interested.

All this said, I still think the Wachowski Brothers had the right idea. If the right developers (Id, Valve, EA, Monolith) were involved, this could have been impressive. Unfortunately, Shiny Entertainment couldn't hack the Matrix, and neither should you.

Hope the review helped.

Rating:
Summary: A mildly diverting game
Review: *NOTE: This review is from itreviews.co.uk*
In spite of all the flaws that stare you in the face after an hour or two of playing Enter The Matrix, the one criticism you can't level at it is that it was rushed. Having being worked on in some form or other pretty much since the first film came out, you can only conclude that this is the game that the developers wanted to produce.

And certainly, it's hard to argue that much expense has been spared on the multimedia front. There's over an hour of fresh new Matrix footage, a script overseen by the Wachowski Brothers, and a few other factors that sparkle when printed on the back of the box. It did raise a chuckle, mind, that we were offered the chance to 'Save Your Progress' when all we'd done was watch a bit of video and pick which of the two characters - Ghost or Niobe - we wanted to play as.

The action splits into a few disciplines. There's fighting, driving and a hovercraft piece as well, and each requires differing skills and slightly differing controls. The game introduces a learning curve by throwing up tips as and when it thinks you need them, but this tends to be a little clunky and at times patronisingly basic. That said, it's not particularly tricky to get to grips with what you need to do.

The fighting side is probably the most fun. Assuming a keyboard/mouse combination more traditionally associated with first person shooters, here the mouse is used to execute fighting moves. It's quite a simple system, and that means that it's enjoyable in the early stages, but lacks sophistication and veers towards repetition as things move on.

The game does have one big trick it can throw at you though, with the infamous bullet time option. Sadly, Max Payne did this better than Enter The Matrix a couple of years back. But that's not to say it's not fun. To implement it, you need to wait until your Focus Meter is at a high enough level, and then it's a click of a button to slow the action right down and give you a temporary but welcome unfair advantage.

Despite its flaws, it'd be wrong to write the action section of the game down as poor. It isn't. It's just a lot less adventurous than we were expecting, but still quite good in its own right. It's the rest of the game that really lets the side down. The driving section in particularly is both frustrating and hard to control, especially as your main focus tends to be on shooting down other road users. And you can't ever lose that feeling that everything you're play has been done better (much better, in some cases) elsewhere, and that without the Matrix licence attached, it'd be nothing more than a middle-of-the-road shelf-filler.

Still, that Matrix card is played well. You have to respect the fact that a whole new side story has been created and executed here, and one that weaves well into The Matrix universe. Sadly, that means that for fans, the main reason for shelling out for this will be to see the extra footage. They won't be disappointed with that, but they may well be disappointed with the game.

Verdict: It'll do. At best, this is a mildly diverting game that just happens to be married to one of the biggest movie licences in recent years.

Rating:
Summary: too much hype, not enough game.
Review: I didn't like this game too much. The only thing I liked was the bullet time type fighting, but after a while it gets boring and so does the redundant fighting. It seems they just place you in a building, mumble something about why your there, and then 50 guys suddenly appear that you have to fight. Try another game.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good game
Review: This game is pretty good. Its graphics arent great, and you need a pretty good computer to run it. If you like The Matrix movies its worth having because now its price has dropped! Its too bad you can only play as Niobe and Ghost though...or wait with my new code you can play as Neo!!! and a bunch of other charactors!!! Here it is copy it down for if you get the game or if you already have the game

First open your enter the matrix folder(C:Programfiles\Infograms\Enter the Matix)
make a backup of the actors folder

Now find the "Ghost_Costume01.dcx" or Niobe_Costume01.dcx"
(there will be 6 of each of these files for Ghost and Niobe, 01,02,03 etc)

Drag all of those files to your desktop

Now find the file "Neo.dcx", make 6 copies of this file and paste them where your
Ghost or Niobe files were

Now you need to re-name your six Neo.dcx files to the names of the other files you
dragged to your desktop(Neo.dcx changes to "Ghost_Costume01.dcx" the next one to
Ghost_Costume02.dcx" and so on.

Be sure to still leave one extra Neo.dcx file in the folder

Other Charactors that work!!

AgentSmith.dcx
AgentJackson.dcx
AgentJohnson.dcx
AgentThompson.dcx
Morpheus_coat.dcx
Trinity_zen.dcx
Sparks.dcx
Keymaker.dcx
Seraph.dcx
Axel.dcx
Abel.dcx
Ballard.dcx
Bane.dcx
Cain.dcx
Cujo.dcx
Twin.dcx
Vector.dcx
Vlad.dcx
Worm.dcx
test.dcx

Rating:
Summary: Almost as bad as the sequels.
Review: Everyone has their own idea of tasteful and tacky.

Rundown, shabby, lacking style, dowdy.
The developers of this game took a great idea and made a few bucks off it. Had they put a little more effort into the look and feel of the game, and possibly the story, they could have made a lot of bucks off it.

As it is, it looks like a console port and plays like a console port. The graphics, for all the hype, are hardly cutting edge, and the gameplay is buggy.

Halfway through the game, instead of asking "What is the Matrix?", I was thinking "Why am I bothering?" The only reason I kept playing was to see the filmed cutscenes, and even they were lifeless.

Get this game when it goes in the dollar bin. Otherwise, don't waste your money.