Enter the Matrix

"I know Kung-Fu..."

Man, I love the kung-fu in this game. I know everyone has wanted to kick the living daylights out of some poor police officers ever since the first movie came out.
Anyway, the graphics are beautiful. This is the first game I know of that requires DirectX 9.0. There are a few glitches I have noticed, but I installed the patch and most of them disappeared. The sound is okay, with fairly poor sound effects, but the techno music that plays during the big action scenes makes you feel like it's a movie.
The only let-downs I experienced were the fact that it is short and the hacking portion was even shorter. It took me only 3 hours to complete it with Niobe on normal difficulty. It took a bit longer with Ghost, but that's just because I was stuck on a level for a while. I think there was a small problem with the AI, and a character I was supposed to protect kept dying to quickly. Like I said, the hacking was a bit of a disappointment. I would of thought the rabbit hole was a bit deeper than that.
The exclusive film footage was a nice bonus, especially the bit with Niobe and Persephone :D. The ''cineractives'' pulled the story together, and moved it along at a nice pace, and load times are practically nil. The short, frequent load times are, in my opinion, far more convenient than a long load at the beginning of the level.
Fighting the Agents is fun, though you cannot kill them. I would've liked a finishing move where you put a gun to their head and say, ''Dodge this!'' There is a certain depth to the hand-to-hand combat that I find very fulfilling. I am still discovering new combinations and moves that I never knew existed.
The Wachowski brothers did a very good job on this game, and it does a good job of filling you in on what Niobe and Ghost are up to during the course of the Matrix: Reloaded, I just wish they would have worked a bit harder to make the hacking portion longer, and maybe a few more levels after the end, where the game sort of left me hanging, wanting to see the movie. In fact, this game is a brilliant marketing tool. After you complete the game, I can almost guarantee that you will want to go and see Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity kick some more of Agent Smith's behind.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/30/03, Updated 05/30/03