Raven Software have been copping some press lately with the recent announcements that they've laid off a bunch of their workforce at the end of two of their most recent projects, Wolfenstein and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The official statement, "Raven Software is slightly reducing its workforce to better reflect the studio's upcoming slate", implies that they're still hard at work on other titles - one of which is Singularity.

At GamesCom recently, Activision Senior Producer Brian Pass took us through Raven's next first-person shooter, giving us a solid introduction to the game's story and walking us through a couple sections of it, demonstrating the key new element they hope will differentiate it from other titles - time manipulation.



The basic story - you're a US soldier who has landed on an old Russian base. Back in the Cold War era, this top secret Russian base, located on an off-shore island called Katorga 12, was researching this spooky new material they'd discovered which they refer to as "Element 99" (I assume this is a reference to the periodic table, except that position is apparently occupied by something called Einsteinium). This material was discovered to have incredible properties, but during the research there was a catastrophic accident which lead to the island being abandoned and quarantined.

Fast forward to 2010, when weird activity on the island is detected. The USA, in their role as world police, decides to send a recon flight to the island to investigate what is going on. The flight goes awry and ends up crash-landing on the island, which is where the game begins - you, as the pilot, must figure out what is going on and escape unharmed (or as unharmed as possible, anyway).

The game starts with your character finding the Time Manipulation Device, which is fortunate for him because it forms the basis of the game. Using the TMD, you can move objects forward or backward through time - aging obstacles so they crumble into dust, or restoring a broken staircase to its former functional state of existence. Awesomely, it also works on enemies, so if you're sick of smashing them with machine guns or something, you can just age them to death, which works pretty well.



Another function the TMD has is called 'statis', which is basically the same sort of thing as the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, except souped up. One of the cool examples we saw was using statis to grab an incoming rocket out of the air, suspend it, turn it around, and launch it back to its source. You'll also use it to solve various puzzles that crop up along the way that involve moving objects around.

In addition to using the TMD as a weapon you've also got your usual crop of FPS guns to cause havoc with. One particularly cool one we saw was a weapon that fires steerable bullets, which definitely takes a lot of the effort out of the usually boring task of, you know, aiming.

The enemies we saw all looked fairly generic; nothing really stood out, though we weren't really exposed to any boss-like creatures. Most of the enemies appear to be people mutated by Element 99 and thus they have some weird time powers of their own, seeming to teleport-shift around the place while you're doing battle. No doubt there will be more weird and wonderful things that we'll see soon.



Various other time-related shenanigans occur throughout the game. "Echo events" are basically eerie replays of events that happened 50 years ago that help you reconstruct the story (fortunately all the Russian scientists speak English). There are also big time waves which take you back into the past, accompanied by some very cool special effects.

Visually, Singularity is shaping up to look very impressive. Some of the retro, cold-war era scenes reminded me a lot of scenes from BioShock - it has a similar look and feel. The effects are similarly impressive and there's a lot of attention to detail in the environments, which are constantly changing - things like wallpaper deterioration really add to the feeling you're in a crumbling research facility and flitting around through time.

Singularity will have multiplayer, but - as always seems to be the norm at these events - no details were forthcoming. I get the feeling it will have a sort of a Fracture feel to it though - regular FPS style, but instead of raising and lowering the ground you'll be able to move parts of the environment back and forward through time to create a vaguely similar experience.

Overall - it's looking neat. The story seems the tiniest bit contrived, but if you can overlook that it looks like a compelling gameplay experience. The big question is whether the time manipulation will be enough to distinguish it from the plethora of other FPS titles out there. Our verdict is that it looks promising but we want to see more information - particularly about multiplayer!

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