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Nice but there are better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 53 / 68
Date: May 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I got my hands on and played a copy of the PC version. Sad to say I was disappointed. It was pushed as the next great game and the graphics going to be great and cool and all this and that. It just doesn't live up to the hype.

I recommend renting and trying it before you buy it. All your getting is a single player game (no mods, expansion or online gameplay) for a high price and not all that great at that.

Story is somewhat slow and confusing. I haven't completed it yet so we will see but so far nothing to make me sleep with this game under my pillow. You are given tasks in the beginning but not told why or what for so you don't understand.

Graphics were a disappointment on the PC. This game was made for consoles and the PC was an afterthought. Knowing this, the graphics will probably look fine if not ok on the consoles (probably look the best on the xbox). It would have been nice for the graphics to take advantage of PC video cards and processor power.

Sound is not a distraction and actually is the best part of the game. Adds to the mood but is more often instrumental taken from the first matrix. There are some times when the music is heavier and makes you feel more pumped up and ready to take on all the bullets. Best part of the game (which is sad)

Controls are wierd. Perhaps this is because of it being on the PC but I think even with a gamepad it would feel wierd. Your character runs EVERYWHERE. Kind of annoying when going into a tense situation. Guess your not suppose to sneak or be careful but go in with guns blazing. Which would be cool but the fighting is reduced to button mashing. There is no training center or dojo to learn how to master fighting, focus (bullet time) or shooting. Instead you are given 'tips' as you move through the game. The controls are clumsy and found myself at times with my back to ememy strugling to face them to fight. Seems the game would rather show you how cool you look than let you actually do something useful. Seems to be very big on looks but lacking on substance.

Save your money!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 21
Date: June 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Don't be fooled. While The Matrix Reloaded might've been a GREAT movie, this game just doesn't cut it. The idea of the game is great, thus, giving this game great potential, but the developers simply didn't use all the potential it had. This game lacked in every aspect, the only thing that might've been good was the gameplay. The controls are espiecially difficult to master. I can't imagine what they were thinking, and why they didn't use different setups. The graphics are horrible as well, and the sound isn't original. The only thing that appealed to me (the only original idea of the game), is that you can hack into computers, where you'd be given a real DOS prompt, and you have to hack yourself in (without any command lists). But if you arn't a computer genius, that part will be hard as well, and you'll be forced to use guides. This game isn' worth the money at all, BELIEVE ME ON THIS!

Enter the Matrix (PC) Review

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 15
Date: June 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

After playing through Enter the Matrix you wonder if the last fifteen or twenty hours or so you spent playing it was really worth seeing a few extra scenes hacked (literally) out of the Matrix Reloaded movie or enduring the tedious driving/flying chase scenes, thinking all the while how this could have been a much better game.

It's possible I'm being a bit too harsh. Then again, Infogrames - scratch that, make it the renamed company Atari - spent reportedly (according to BusinessWeek) around $80 million US (including the purchase of Shiny Entertainment, the developers) to create this cross-platform extravaganza of mediocrity.

4 CDs and 3 gigabytes of installation love later, it's high time to finally play this highly anticipated game. In essence, Enter the Matrix is the Matrix Reloaded Sideshow, unraveling bits and pieces of the movie's plot that got no or very little celluloid time. I won't reveal any of it here except the game starts out with an attempt to retrieve the drop-box package left in the Matrix by the crew of the Osiris, the ship featured in the anime DVD tie-in, the Animatrix. The package, later revealed as a video message, contains intelligence information that the machines are boring their way to Zion, the rebel stronghold in the "real world." This information is then revealed in the movie.

The interweaving of the plots between the movie, the game, and in a few parts the tie-in anime DVD, is really one of the bright spots here. The plot of the game unfolds in conjunction with the movie, though really not much of the real plot of the movie is really revealed, which can be disconcerting, seeing that the game is said (I never timed it) to contain about 70 minutes of footage shot during filming of the movie. When you finish a level or get past something important, you'll see more of the footage - or footage of an in-game cut scene, which can be really annoying.

Players can pick and choose which character they want to play, Niobe or Ghost, and the game is somewhat different, depending on the character. For instance, in the driving scenes, Niobe drives while Ghost shoots. At another, Ghost acts to distract enemy snipers while Niobe navigates around them to get inside a power plant complex.

Much of the game therefore consists of a behind-the-back third-person action game that really resembles Max Payne. The 3d environments are, like the rest of the game, a mixture of good things and bad things - most of the environments seem empty and very nondescript, while others (typically smaller environments) are well-crafted and detailed, featuring polished marble floors and the like. A few feature destructible objects and structures, though they seem to have no real purpose except to make players say "wow that's cool."

Gameplay is very combat oriented; you'll frequently encounter a host of human civilians, guards, police and military types, as well as the occasional agents and other rogue programs. Enter the Matrix offers a variety of weapons to use, as well as a fair number of hand-to-hand combat moves. For instance, you have your standard hand or kick-type attacks and combos, as well as disarming attacks, behind-the-back attacks, and so forth.

On top of all that, there is the slow-motion "bullet-time" Focus mode you can enter, which allows your character to do more fantastic or hard-hitting moves, aim better, run on walls, and other nigh-impossible things. You only have limited focus points that regenerate slowly after time (health is the same way incidentally), so use it wisely.

The use of weapons can be a bit of a problem - in default third-person mode aim is very much accomplished by an internal auto-targeting mechanism, so you don't really get to aim but aim generally, your character takes care of the rest. Since enemies go behind cover frequently, a number of shots will typically go astray. This means going to first-person mode, though it hardly feels interactive at all - there's no recoil, just a stream of boring bullets; remember Duck Hunter? You can't move forward or backward in first-person mode either.

Since combat is important, the interface should be equally up to the task, but it isn't. In fact it feels clunky at times, and the third-person camera switches to inconceivable action-camera-style views and other angles at the worst moments, sometimes even blocking your view. It sure helps that the enemy won't try to attack you while doing these super-cool moves.

All of this would sound cool generally, but there is a lot of things that really drag this game down. The driving sequences, on a whole, really [stink]. It's hard to conceive of a worse gameplay mode Shiny could have put into this game. The use of Focus mode suddenly makes everything very choppy, while it should be smooth and even - like Max Payne. Some levels feature unlimited hordes of people to fight; others have the typical console-game boss creature. There is only level-based saving, no in-game saves. Some of the stupid plot points of the Matrix Reloaded make their way into the game, more than once. It's very, very easy to waste ammunition, and you'll also spend a bit of time running away from something. Finally, there's even an homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Okay, the tip system is very handy (though it gets in the way at times) and there is an entire Hacking mode which is devious and harkens back to old DOS days, letting you unlock things in the game before you get to them, if you're good enough).

After tallying off some good and bad points, you can see where this is a pretty cool game, though it's got so many negatives against it that it's very hard to recommend. If you're a Matrix fan, sure, why not, but maybe this is better served as a bargain bin game. Still... 80 million, for this?

As much fun as watching the movie

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 16 / 21
Date: May 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

All though I had some difficulty with it at first since I kept trying to do "bullet time" moves from Max Payne, I got the hang of it quickly. The game is alot of fun and is very fast paced if you are aggressive. On easy you can button mash and make it through 75% of the levels. It's a different story on the harder settings. If you don't know all the moves and techniques you're going to have problems.

The story and the ability to suck you into it is where this game truly shines above just about any other game I've ever seen. Only for brief moments are you ever not in the middle of the action. Each "level" is a scene in the story rather than the standard levels that you finish and then leave. In a couple cases though it feels like a weird Matrix episode of Scoobe Doo ( You know when the kids and the monster run back and forth through a series of doors over and over again.) as you run and gun through some areas two and three times being chased by the authorities.

My only complaint is that this game is a counsel game and not a PC game. It has been ported to the PC, and it feels that way. This leads to some annoyance when it comes to shooting/sniping and camera angle. Do not expect Max Payne FPS style shooting/3d person view, it's all auto-aim and auto follow. Though how many times in Max Payne could you kick off a wall and lay out two or three bad guys with a flying round house kick while gunning down two or three more, then run up a wall and do a backflip to safety all without skipping a beat. You'll get the hange of it very quickly.

I'm going to nit-pic the graphics a bit as well. The maps leave something to desire. Nothing fancy, nothing ground breaking, sometimes very basic. In the end this has little to do with the fun factor. People always say they'd rather have game play over eye-candy. Well Enter the Matrix has it by the truck load. It manages to emulate the action of the movies as good as one could hope in a video game. It is this combined with a "never let you rest and catch your breath" story line that makes it a blast to play.

Would I buy it again, of course. If you don't and you're a big fan of the Matrix then you are missing out on the fun.

Almost forgot. There is also the "Hacking" portion of the game which I haven't really figured out yet. Think "green screen DOS" action. Looks interesting.

Enjoyable, but not great

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: July 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I like the Matrix and the Matrix Reloaded, but I don't have a Matrix fan site, so I was a little hesitant to get this game. I'd heard some mixed things about it, but finally decided I was too curious not to buy it for myself.

Honestly, most of what you've heard is true. I'm still enjoying it, nonetheless! It's not mind-blowing great, but it could have been if they'd spent more time on it. Still, it was an interesting experience playing a game so closing tied in with a movie.

Specifically, I'm impressed with what they did do right with this game: The graphics are really impressive in some regards, especially the players. The cut scenes are well done; the voice work and score/sound is great and the movie clips you get are also a nice treat. The hacking utility is a neat addition that I haven't played around with much yet, and although Max Payne also utilizes bullet-time very well, Max doesn't run up the walls and do back flips. He doesn't do half of what these characters will do with just a little practice. All of the nifty moves in the Matrix from the wall-walk to the shooting cartwheel can be done. My favorite is when you fly through the air, spinning and shooting. The first time I managed to do that, I smiled and said, "Okay, that was cool."

However, that being said, they could have done a lot better. The driving sequences are pathetic with a capital P! Switching between hand-to-hand fighting and shooting is somewhat annoying, but not as annoying as the first-person mode that's difficult to get out of quickly. Furthermore, your aim in the game is absolutely horrid unless you use Focus, and even then it's not stellar. It uses auto-aim and it's absurd! If you come from the FPS world, you'll be really annoyed and probably want to stick with hand-to-hand fighting. That was my biggest frustration and I can't for the life of me understand why they don't allow us to aim for ourselves??? It's really not that difficult.

Also, the game is also a bit glitchy, so make sure you download the patch! It's worth the download time if you have a slow connection.

All that being said, I'm still glad I own it and even though it's not perfect and doesn't live up to its potential, I don't feel like I got ripped off like I did after I played Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring-another rush job. I'll keep this one and probably play it again from time to time.

If you're considering buying this for the Matrix fan in your family, do so-they'll love it, just make sure their PC meets the system requirements and they have access to the Internet so they can download the patch.

The concept is innovative, but ultimately the game isn't

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: September 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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) couldnýt 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.

Button-Mashing Slugfest Action!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: October 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

"Enter the Matrix" is a really fun game. Given the much greater depth the two "Matrix" movies have over the game, however, that means that Enter the Matrix has disappointed a lot of people.

I'm not one of them.

I really love playing this game, but you should probably know a few things about it before you go reaching for the Shopping Cart button:

1)Make sure your system can run it. I don't meet *all* the requirements (the hard-drive speed thing is a little ridiculous to ask of a user), but I come close enough to play the game at full detail and resolution with no crashes. I also don't have a DirectX-9-support-in-the-firmware video card, but having DirectX 9 installed was enough. Make sure your machine can handle the processor requirements, RAM, and video, and you should do just fine. If you *don't* meet those requirements, it probably won't install.

2)Defrag before you install, and patch before you play. Like most games today, this one was rushed out to shelves to time with the movie's release. You'll want to download and apply the latest fix before you try to run it. And installing on a clean unfragmented drive makes a BIG difference.

3)Have fun. I mean it. Don't go wondering if you're going to wrack your brain with puzzles or come up with a clever way to beat the level. The bad guys are pretty much the same, getting the cool-looking kung-fu moves to work exactly the way you want them to every time is difficult, and the way you play is pretty linear, despite the fact that events happen differently if you play Niobe or Ghost. There are some levels where you have to either drive (Niobe) or shoot from a car (Ghost), but the driving interface is not that great. Even so, doing these levels can be fun so long as you remember that you're playing a console game ported to the PC.

I'm not trying to sound cynical: as movie tie-in games go, this is one of the best. It drops you some neat little clues about The Animatrix, and the cinematic scenes dovetail nicely with part of The Matrix Reloaded. The gameplay is fun on a level of Street Fighter and Grand Theft Auto - it just doesn't give you the strategic control of Splinter Cell or the multiple solutions of Deus Ex. If you're a fan of First-Person Shooters (FPS), fighter-style games, and/or The Matrix movies, this should provide you with some enjoyable hours of fun while you wait for the next movie to come out.

Details:
This game was played at 1600X1200X32 on a Dell Inspiron 8100, 2.2GHz Pentium IV w/400MHz FSB, 1GB RAM, 32MB GeForce440 MX video card, running Windows XP Pro SP 1, DirectX 9, and no sound card (software emulated). The hard drive is only 5400 RPM.

Great potential, but poorly implemented.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: October 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Ouch. Though I'm sure a lot of development went into this game, dissapointment doesn't adequately describe end result. First, the controls are awkward. While fighting hand to hand, there aren't any real moves that the user can decide to use. All moves happen by themselves and appear to follow variables determined by character position. Bottom line -- it plays itself. If you just punch and kick really fast, you can beat any enemy without knowing what you're doing, and the move may last longer than five seconds, creating a clumsy delay. The weapons are similarly poorly implemented. Auto-aim cannot be disabled, unlike most other similar games. Firing in the general direction of an enemy may instantly kill it with no challenge at all, or the bullets may veer off wildly, accomplishing nothing. Any idiot could aim better than the lousy auto-aim. The bullet-time is okay at best, as most moves are difficult to initiate, and are rarely useful in tough situations. To see a truly good example of bullet-time, play Max Payne -- a user-made Kung Fu modification plays better than the Matrix's combat implementation. Finally, the game is SHORT. Really short -- as in, "That's IT?!!" The last level is so incredibly impossible and unamusing that it's just not worth completing. Better luck next time, Shiny Entertainment.

Is it just my mouse?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: November 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

While it does contain some interesting story elements, and tie-ins to both the movie series, and the Animatrix, this is one game that could use some major improvements.

The game LOOKS good. It really does. It calls up the bullet tracking, the agents' impresive dodging, and (abandoned?) general eye candy factors of the original movie, which is a plus. Things still have a new, and not quite so 'played out' feel to them.

The view, camera action, and controls, however, are horrible. If this game had the viewing, controls, and overall engine technology used in the game "Splinter Cell" it would most likely be a 5 star game. (SC took a few sessions to get used to, but is solid, playable, and very replayable.)

The characters, even when standing still, twitch and spasm like a couple of crack fiends. The camera seems to find other things to be more interested in, especially when in crucial moments when precision tactics must be employed, yet are impossible due to the awful 'auto camera'.

The control overall is jerky, and either under or over-reponsive, no matter how you change the settings, and using the viewfinder for sniping is even worse.

The game, again, looks rather good. It's got a lot of potential, and good content. It's great to watch, listen to, and have a few unarmed combat battles in. It just isn't fun to play overall.

'Hacking'
A built in mini-game / cheat system.
If the game was controllable, this would be a nice add-on for AFTER you complete the game the first time.
(It IS a nice feature, and interesting to delve into. I still think the 'cheat' command shouldn't even be available until the game is completed. That's just sad, and does reflect the average gamer nowadays... 'WH3r3 R T3H CHEETZ?!'. Ugh.

Overall, the game looks nice, has good story backup, and is a solid addendum to the story. Unforunately the playability suffers, badly, and ends up being a filler for the story and a few really cool battles here and there.

DJB

Ultimately Disappointing

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: June 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

There is a startling long legacy of good movies or TV series that have been translated into mediocre and half baked games (think Star Trek) and although Enter The Matrix doesn't do half as badly as some of its predecessor's it still a long way from a good game.

In the game you play the characters Niobe and Ghost from the movie The Matrix Reloaded. The characters are played seperately so you can choose to complete the game as either one before tackling the second character. Therein lies my first gripe with the game: the developers said that playing both characters would ultimately be fulfilling and crucial to a full appreciation of the game but I was disappointed to find some stages were exactly the same for both characters. Besides the fact that it was extremely frustrating to cover the same ground, it also contradicted the storyline and cinematics in some instances. For example, in on stage when the character has to run away from an agent, the cut scene clearly shows Niobe rubbing her jaw after getting punched by an agent. But if you play Ghost it is you that gets punched although the cut scene remains the same! Overall, the amount of repetition within the missions was far too great and probably due to a rush to meet the release date for the game.

In terms of gameplay, experienced gamers will find the game far too easy. particularly disappointing are the controls for driving cars as well as the Logos which are almost impossible to control. Furthermore, the AI leaves a lot to be desired. Enemies will often do bizarre things or more irritatingly just stay at the same spot and do nothing even when they have spotted you, allowing you to go up to them and dispatch them easily. Worse were AI vehicles: police cars veer and careen in the most ludicrous manner and at some points seemed to be almost hanging in the air! One good point are the Focus effects which allows you to do matrix like abilities. however, although they are interesting at first they generally lose their appeal as the game progresses. This is generally true for most of the gameplay as the game rapidly descends into a button mashing slugfest.

The graphics were disappointing especially in terms of the ridiculous basic requirements for this game. This is not to say that they were bad, on the whole the locations were rendered decently though the characters could have done a little more work. But given the stunning visuals in the movie you cannot but feel greatly let down by the graphics here. The sound though was very well crafted and for once I had no complaints in this area.

Overall, I would say that this is a must for fans only. There are far better action games on the market and this game shows signs of rushed production with a generally poor AI, excessive repetition and sub-par gameplay. The best thing about it is the 40 minutes of unseen footage and the many subplots and hints that are filled from the movie but then only fans would be interested in that.

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