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Enter the Max Payne

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Before you buy this game, notice two important things: the game itself is on 4 CDs which means that it occupies 3 gigabytes on your hard-disk, and also your computer has to be one of the fastest things on earth to play smoothly:
I have an Intel Pentium 4, 1.80 GHz, 60GB (space), 256 MB of RAM, Philips Brilliance 150P2 monitor, a GeForce 4 MX 440 and even with the game quality set very low, this game lags incredibly. I'm not saying my computer is fenomenal, but I personally don't think that my specs are shabby.
Also, I would like to add that some might say that this game is fairly good and original even though it's nothing spectacular, but the fact is that it's not even original: as many of you may know, Max Payne was a first attempt to capture the effect of The Matrix (first movie) and it was very successful in doing so. This game tries to blend Max Payne and the ideas of the movie Matrix in one, but it does so in a very nonchalant way. If you like the time-slow-motion thingy I'd suggest you get Max Payne instead.
Apart from this, the controls on Enter the Matrix for PC are very easy to get used to and are pretty confortable. Although it may look hard initially it's not impossible to get the feel for it after playing it for about 30 mins.
The music is not too bad and actually keeps me in a state of suspense sometimes, and if I'm not mistaken, the music they used in the game is the same used in the movie. Also the sound FX are pretty good.
The weapons are horrible....nothing else to it. The 1v1 combat is pretty cool and satisfying and I like the fact that there is a pretty vast array of kung-fu techniques one can use (even though when you do it's pretty unintentional....I just start clicking everything ^_^ ) Many things are faithful to the movie, but notice one thing: the movie does everything better.
You can only play as either Niobe or Ghost which I personally think was a very smart choice because if they had let you have Neo, there would be no point to the game since it would be too easy to beat everyone (including agents.)
For those of you who love Matrix and are obsessed with it, I suggest you get the game, but if your not particularly interested, don't bother. It's a typical rushed game made for a movie that has to come out within a certain date (so rushed that they found bugs a week after it was released. To get the patch go to the Enter the Matrix website.)

Mediocre game, opportunity wasted

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: July 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Some of the graphics and character modelling look great, but that's the best the game has to offer. The gameplay is uninspired: you run through a level, fighting guys, until you get to the end of the level, then you go to the next level. There's no strategy to it and nothing to think about. You just tap keys a lot. The game levels are interwoven with cut scenes, both animated and filmed, which is actually annoying in practice; you want to play the game and you have to stop and wait far too long to do so. Plus the inflexible game save system forces you to watch the same movies over and over again for difficult levels. The controls are awkward. The story, such as it is, is unnecessary, and anyway if they wanted to tell a story they should have just released it as a video like The Animatrix. The saddest thing is that they wasted a great opportunity to make a mind-blowing game; the game is sadly conventional.

Save your money for a PC game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: May 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have played about the first hour of the game. It is obviously NOT designed as a PC game. It does NOT have a save anywhere feature, a serious flaw. Navigation and movement is jerky. When you move the mouse the character on screen (it's a 3rd person perspective) moves in increments of about 10 or 15 degrees. So it's impossible to precisely control right/left turning or aim a weapon properly. The game compensates for that by having a green halo surround an enemy when they are targeted. Shift right/left a click or so, see green halo, fire...they die. It's a dumbed down shooter.

The martial arts scenes are impressive, although the player has no control over movements. One need only move close and mouse click repeatedly to see scripted ass kicking. It is to yawn after a short while.

There is a first person mode that can be uses for sniping. Aim lacks precision. Again, the mouse does not move smoothly, as it does in games designed for the PC, but in increments. Also, when shooting around a corner, a special move, it is impossible to aim at all. One sees the character leaning and firing, but the camera angle is fixed and there is no possibility of actually aiming at an enemy. It's a great way to waste ammo.

Focus or slow time is easy to use, and it has its advantages both with hand to hand and weapon combat. There are special focus moves that are rather nice, if scripted. Again there's little player control. Shift+forward+F = fancy scripted focus move, which is probably going to be useful against the enemy, but it needs no player skill to accomplish. And, that is a huge flaw. It's WAY more fun to pull off a fancy move if the player is controlling it.

Enemy AI is behaving rather stupidly in the game so far. They wait while their comrades are being punched out, and then you can walk over to them to do the same to them. They will shoot from a distance though. It's hard to shoot back precisely though because of the jerky side to side movements of the mouse. And, past a distance the green halos don't appear.

There is a first person sniper mode. Again, moving the crosshairs is a jerky affair, so aiming is imprecise. Close is good enough to make a kill though. In first person mode one can strafe right or left but not move forward or backwards. No sneaking around for you snipers! And, no leaning around corners to snipe either. )c:

Too much money was spent on story scripting, cinematic scenes, and not enough on making the game FUN to play. It's a poor shooter. Jedi Outcast got it right. Enter the Matrix is just another movie tie in console game poorly ported to the PC. The developers don't love shooters, or games, and it shows.

This is a place for REVIEWS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 19 / 50
Date: May 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This is a section for RE-views. RE as in past tense, meaning you have played the game. How can you review something that wasn't even for sale on the day you wrote your "review". I'd even give you leway had you played the demo but, don't review and put up 5 stars on what is coming.

Interesting story, bad game.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: May 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

"Unfortunately, no one can be told how bad this game is"

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

You can play as either Niobe (Morpheus' former lover) or the Kirkegaard-quoting Ghost (her gunner aboard the Logos, who (in one of the game's only humorous moments, identifies onanism as his personal philosophy). While the two characters' storylines intersect, there are segments in which each character has different tasks to do. Unfortunately, this isn't consistent; there are large segments in which you have to perform the same tasks, even though it breaks continuity from the other character's storyline (for example, when playing as Ghost, you have to rescue Niobe from the Merovinginan; when playing as Niobe, you have to rescue Ghost). As storylines go, they're both disappointingly short. Whereas it usually takes me about a week or two to finish first-person games with storylines (Deus Ex, Medal of Honor), I got both storylines done in about a day.

The gameplay is frustratingly linear. I guess I was spoiled by Deus Ex, in which you frequently have multiple avenues by which to achieve a goal, and actions taken (or not taken) have consequences later in the game. With Enter the Matrix, you have to follow a set path (doors often stay locked until you've accomplished certain tasks, and nearly every door locks behind you, forcing you to go only in the direction the game designers intended).

Aiming - especially with sniper weapons - is another problem area. With non-sniper weapons, the game aims for you, at what it thinks you should be shooting at. Certain objects are highly explosive; it makes sense to take out several enemies by shooting these objects. Unfortunately, if there's an enemy near the object, the gun will shoot at the enemy even if you're aimed directly at the explosive object. When you use a sniper scope, aiming is erratic; the crosshairs frequently overshoot the mouse movements.

"Focus mode", the game's odd choice of terminology for what's called "bullet time" by the movie effects people, was practically unusable on my machine. Every time I entered it, my screen would alternately flash between the game and a pixelated version of my computer desktop. Since my desktop is much brighter than the game (which is horribly dark), it had the effect of obscuring the action completely. (The fix, which I discovered only after I had solved the game, is to download and install a patch from the Atari Web site, open the configuration file with a text editor, and change a setting to enable the "alternate focus" mode.)

Speaking of video, the configuration options are horribly designed. If you wish to alter brightness, contrast or gamma, you have to do so before the game begins. If you're in the middle of the game and want to change these settings, you have to exit the game completely and re-start it. Since the game only saves when you've reached particular objectives (there's no quick-save, and it doesn't offer the option to save when you exit the game), this means you have to wait until you reach a spawn point to quit, otherwise you lose some of your progress. Also, these changes frequently don't get saved to the configuration file, requiring one to either edit the configuration file by hand, or change the settings every time one runs the game. Other options can be changed within the game, but still require you to quit gameplay and return to the main menu (again, losing anything you've done since the last spawn point).

I do like the fact that health eventually regenerates, once you've gone for a specific amount of time without taking further damage. However, this is also inconsistent; in certain levels, you have a character (or, in one case, a helicopter) which you must defeat in order to progress, and your health doesn't regenerate until you've done so. Since ammunition is extremely limited, and Focus power runs out very quickly, it's almost impossible to win some of these confrontations (especially the helicopter) without enabling one or more of the cheats.

And then there are the driving segments. Control is nearly impossible; as with sniper weapons, the cars (and the Logos) respond poorly to the mouse and keyboard, apparently responding to speed of mouse movement (or duration of keypress) logarithmically. You'd think that perhaps Niobe, the best pilot in the fleet, wouldn't have so much trouble piloting a car, let alone her own ship, but for some reason they decided to make all the vehicles respond to a mere approximation of what the player asks them to do.

With the exception of the Merovingian's mansion, in which you're fighting vampires (and what might be werewolves who are also killed by wooden stakes through the heart), your opponents are limited to security guards, policemen and SWAT teams (with one or two unkillable agents thrown in just in case you get tired of killing cops). When you perform certain lengthy moves (such as choking an opponent from behind), all your other opponents stop shooting at you until the move is done. The opponents' intelligence is shockingly limited as well; if you duck behind a wall, they'll rarely come after you, preferring instead to vibrate in place until you present yourself as a target again.

And finally, the game is rife with bugs. Often, these present themselves in the cutscenes, which may play without sound or with the video going several times normal speed while the audio remains normal (or, in one particular case, without sound and in fast-forward mode). Occasionally, objects required for the completion of a level can't be picked up, and in one particularly annoying level in which you have to pilot the Logos through tight tunnels, I found myself frequently stuck (requiring a restart of the level) or somehow outside the map and unable to get back inside it (also requiring a restart). There are frequent visual errors as well. And this is with the patch applied!

So, on a scale of one to ten, I give this game a blue pill.

Another over-hyped, rushed release

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I am a giant fan of the Matrix series. I've already seen Reloaded three times, but Enter the Matrix is just another example of software developers rushing the release of a game to coincide with the movie release. It's not that the game is horrible, its just that it isn't finished yet. This game honestly feels like it is still in a late alpha/early beta stage of development. In the fighting portions of the game, there are immense clipping errors, clunky controls, non-existant enemy AI, never ending enemy respawn (in front of my eyes, enemies I had just killed would instantly reappear in the same place when I turned around) and no creativity in the kung-fu control. Rapidly mashing the punch or kick buttons will automatically pick a random combo depending on whether or not you're in "focus" mode. The driving engine is simply abominable. The driving AI continually drives into buildings and off bridges. Of the few other cars on the road, all look like they have hydraulics going beserk. Both police cars and normal traffic bounce around like their tires are made of "flubber." The integrated FMV is wonderful and the sound is decent. I'm disappointed that the game boasted 3d EAX HD sound capability, but it only supports the Audigy2 generation of EAX, so anyone with Audigy soundcards are out of luck for realistic 3d sound. I hope you have a high-end system if you want to play this game. EtM ran marginally well on my dual P3 1Ghz, 1GB RDRAM, Audigy, Radeon 8500 system, and I was running at 800x600 with only 50% detail. Characters still lagged and voices barely synched with the faces. I'm severely disappointed with this game and I am returning it today. .... If the developers had another 6 months to complete the game, maybe it would be ready...but for now, everyone should avoid this money trap like the plague that it is.

Everything is just great (apart from graphics and AI)

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Enter the Matrix has finally came. But for a lot of hard-core games such as I it is a great disappointment. I don't know where to start. Retard AI? Cheesy graphics? Let's begin with the pros. First of all, the story and flow of events are just great. Both directed and written by The Wachowski Bros, Enter The Matrix adds many many detail to the universe of Matrix and helps us to understand it better. The cutscenes are a work of art. They include many actors and actresses such as Carrie-Anne Moss (don't need to mention Ghost and Niobe). And they also include many scenes from the movie(extended to provide more vision of Ghost and Niobe). The sfx are also very good. Music and sfx comes directly from the movies and you keep telling yourself that this sound looks familiar. This game has enough action to blow you away. Fighting scenes are absolutely fantastic. There are many exotic movements you make such as wall walking and cartwheeling. And the camera angles increase the amount of artistic impression. Controls are neither too easy nor too harsh. They're just perfect. But in some fighting scenes you'll find yourself hitting the buttons like crazy. Unfotunately all these great features don't make this game great. Well, here we go: Graphics are bad, I mean real bad. Character animations are robotic, rather than artistic. Square and non moving wheels, poor fire effects, no weapon recoil, unrealistic scenery etc. Unforunately no one can be told how bad the graphics are, you have to see them for yourself. AI is a serious problem in this game. In driving scenes, if you are playing with Ghost there is only one thing you can do: just cross your fingers and pray that Niobe drives good. 'Cause she hits walls, flips the car oftenly and sometimes gets stuck between cars. Later your pursuers come and fill you with holes. I shot millions of bullets(with an mp5 like a machinegun) to the twins but there wasn't any single damage to their car and themselves. Because they hurried too much to synchronolise the releases of the game and the movie, Enter The Matrix is not a great game. But it surely worths playing...

Seems as if they rushed a glitchy game out

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Granted, I have only been playing this game for a few days, but I have noticed several annoying glitches that are probably due to the game being rushed out the door to coincide with the film's release.
Specifically, characters continue to walk when you are not holding buttons down - it is impossible for the characters to just "stand there" and hide. during one of the car scenes, the oncoming cars were all bouncing up and down like lowriders. I accidentally fell off a bridge in the car and ended up "under the map" - driving under and through buildings until I had to restart the level. Several police officers have been observed running into walls, and just continuing to run, head against wall.
Anyone looking at buying this game should also be aware that you need a MINIMUM of an 800 Mhz Computer.
I am going to continue to play, of course - Being a huge Matrix fan, that simple fact guarrantees the game will sell well, but It is impossible to be immersed in a quality gaming experience with so many glaring faults being thrown in your face.

Its only fun cause its the Matrix...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Should you get this game? The best answer is yes and no. For a Matrix fan this is a no brainer ~ your going to force yourself to put up with all of the game's faults. Not a die hard Matrix fan? Then your not going to miss much here.

Some things to consider...
1. This is a bad version of Max Payne.
I had a lot of difficulty adjusting to the gun fights, the movement and aiming felt very jerky and unprecise.(You also have to run everywhere for some reason) This is quite the opposite of Max Payne, it only took me a few minutes to become quite good with the gun fighting.

2. The hand to hand fighting is done quite well, but hard to incorporate into large battles.(Like when mobs of guards are in your way)

3. The game can be played from the point of view of both characters, Ghost and Niobe.(just don't expect a huge difference, its just the same level from a different angle)

4. The driving sequences are, well, not my favorite. Some people may find some joy to them, but I found them rather boring and poorly done.

Overall the action was put together pretty well, I'm playing through the game since I'm a big Matrix fan, but I dont' think i'll do it a second time.

Ok after finishing the game I'm going to give all you action fans a little advice out there - save your money. The videos are nice, but not incorporated very well and they are..well the only reason I would see anyone forcing themselves to play this game. Every department needs help in a major way. Graphics have bluring and see through polygon problems, the sound is not very well done in EAX, even with the new patch. I found myself driving and make huge turns at just the slightest movement, taking huge jumps off small bumps and landing smack into a wall-aggrivating. And this was supposed to be directed by the brothers? There is no real "umph" to the story, you just run around and shoot guards most of the time watching parts of the movie you could have guessed happened if you had just watched it in the theatre and the animatrix already.

To sum it up, I've already uninstalled it and and reinstalled Max Payne so I could remember how a real game is made.

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