Enter the Matrix

Rating:
Summary: was worth the money
Review: I bought this game on on disk it only worked in a DVD drive. It is in no way the greatest game i've ever played, but for the price it is a great buy.

Rating:
Summary: Regular Gameplay good , but not other parts.
Review: Great game! I have beat the first several stages and am impressed with the depth of the action and sound effects. Skip the cutscenes though, lots of foul language and innuendo.

Rating:
Summary: Gets Old, But Still Fun
Review: First, I don' understand why people have problems whit this game, my computer is far from cutting-edge and it runs the game fine. I have 512MB RAM, it's cheap, get some more if this game is slow. Anyway, if you like fighting games with a storyline, this game isn't too bad. The fighting and stuff is really cool but other stuff is lacking. Shiny ran out of money and has advertising in the game, you look at ads for Intel and Cadillac, and you shoot at Escalades. I really think they should cover the basics before going as in-deph as they did with the levels that you really can't explore anyway. Well, I think that now that the game is 10 bucks, you should give it a try.

Rating:
Summary: You should Enter the Matrix, but a PC isn't the best place..
Review: Enter the Matrix mainly follows events of Reloaded, from the perspective of 2 characters, Niobe and Ghost. Gunplay, Driving, Adventure and the trademark Bullet Time & Kung Fu, all feature here, but some aspects where done better than others.

Choose which character you want to be at the start of the game (Niobe or Ghost), and while the storylines do differ for each, some areas are the same for both characters which can be something of a disappointment. However areas to explore are vast and varied, and in some cases the setting helps add to the tension.
Note that in the Post Office shootout featured near the beginning of the game, the pillars crumble from gunshots and the design looks polished, but after this point, you start feeling the game was rushed slightly, notably with concerns to some AI and the driving sections.

The controls for this game can be gotten used to fairly quickly once you are familiar with the layout. However, I must say that they are better suited to a console system such as a PS2, and the mouse was not considered for targeting when shooting, which detracts from the user-friendly aspects of the game. Whether it is Kung Fu, driving, or shooting, controls remain consistent and are never too difficult.

Generally, graphical quality of this game does not fail to disappoint, but as I mentioned before, a slight rushjob is evident for driving scenes, which lack the same polish found in the game's early levels. A good point is, all characters featured in this game look like their counterparts. From the two main characters to the other featured characters (Smith/Seraph/Trinity), the likenesses couldn't be any better.

The motion of characters is superb. This becomes particularly important during combat, which has been done excellently. Punches and kicks flow together well, and I myself was surprised as I expected it to be somewhat rigid, but it was all smoothly captured. You have a limited amount of Focus (bullet time), but when it is used it allows for a number of extra stunts including scaling walls, faster powerful Kung Fu moves, and quicker, accurate shooting, and is visually as impressive as I had expected. Confronting an agent and firing at them is a bad idea, however, when they dodge, they don't blur like in the movies, instead they just bend very quickly, which doesn't look the same but is still perfectly bearable.

As for storyline, it is well thought out, and cutscenes illustrate what is going on very well. This all helps to detail the reasons why the characters do what they do in the game, rather than you just shooting and fighting without a reason. The characters' involvement, while not heavily featured in the movie, is key to the core storyline of the movie. It may or may not be enough to keep you interested, but both Niobe and Ghost are often doing something important (and risky) on which other characters depend, for example in the Chase Morpheus driving level. They never simply play minor roles, which is good.

In terms of replayability and content, this is both good and bad. After playing through the game as both characters, you can use codes that may be given to you upon completion in the Hacking section, which is essentially a command-line style interface where you can access 'drives', and view anything from character profiles, to information on weapons or codes for 'dropping' a weapon at a point in the game to pick up, and unlock features that affect the main game via entering or cracking of commands and codes.

While literally all of the features I had expected here were included, a feature was left out, which is included on every other system except PC: Multiplayer feature. for the console versions, Multiplayer allows 1-on-1 fights against another player, as a particular character which is automatically selected depending on the fight background. This features fights such as Trinity VS Niobe in the Dojo, or even Morpheus VS Smith in the Subway. How these could not be included is a mystery to me...

...but despite this, the PC version has an advantage over all other versions which makes up for lack of Multiplayer: Editing of character files. Because for the PC, you can view all the game's files in My Computer or Windows Explorer, this allows you to take a characters model/appearance (which is a .dcx file) and replace all the other files for either Ghost or Niobe's appearance which those of your choosing. This has to be done manually, and although it won't give you your chosen characters fighting moves, it will have their appearance, and allows you to play as characters not even featured in the Multiplayer for consoles, such as the albino Twins, or any of the agents (you can even edit other normally non-playable characters, like replace Sparks with Morpheus (!) This has to be done manually, so take a look at a character editing FAQ to learn how to do so.

With all the combinations you can have when editing, it could make the PC version last the longest of all versions of Enter The Matrix, but if you don't feel like tampering with the files/don't wan't to play as unplayable characters, and you have a console, I recommend you get this game for your PS2, Xbox or Gamecube. This may not be everyone's cup of tea, because from an unbiased point of view, it's hard to give a game of this type, a rating. It really depends on what aspects of a game you like and how much you're into the Matrix trilogy. Some may love it, some may hate it, so I'll settle for 3-star rating, but if you're a die-hard Matrix fan, and/or you don't have a games console, I would recommend this. In addition, those with some cash to spare who are absolute Matrix completists (or felt totally cheated that they couldn't play through the console game as the main characters of Reloaded), you could always get a second-hand copy of this and edit the game to your heart's content - Merovingian VS the Keymaker anyone?!

Rating:
Summary: It is a good mindless shoot-em-up.
Review: Many people are angry at the game because it gets repetitive. Hello, mindless shoot-em-up? That's how most of them go. It's no Max Payne 2, but it's still good. Most of the people that write bad reviews about this game are RPG fans and do not enjoy mindless killing. I love RPGs, but I also like shooters. You have to like mindless killing to like this game, and I, like many others, do.