"Whatever you do, DON'T enter the Matrix"

Introduction

This game was a complete blind buy on my part - being sold for £19.99 at HMv - and with two discs, I thought it was a great bargain. How wrong I was. I enjoyed the first Matrix movie, and watched the other two, despite not having a clue what most of the characters were talking about, and thought the game might be worth buying. I'm sure the shop assistant who served me must have been thinking: "There's one born every minute", as I purchased this.

Gameplay - 5/10

The gameplay seems to get stale very fast indeed. Enemies seem somewhat uninventive - gunmen and Agent Smith clones are what you seem to spend a lot of the time fighting - and the occasional helicopter. Apart from that, you're doing little more than running around and jumping across buildings - all the time being guided by a helpful arrow showing you where to go. After a while, this becomes aggravating, and dull.

Your health is shown by a percentage bar, but that sure can drain very fast indeed. At some points I've found myself losing energy fast, and I often can't even figure out who or what is attacking you. I remember during one stage finding my energy draining from 100% to zero in a matter of seconds, and I just couldn't understand why. If I took a one-hit kill, the game should take all my energy at once,rather than slowly draining it away.

The gameplay boasts a mode called "focus", whereby you slow the rest of the world down and allow yourself to run up walls and perform other stunts that you couldn't do otherwise. This is fun - for about the first five times, then the novelty wears off and you realise that all you're actually doing is running around and shooting people with a gun - and that's about all. Hardly Resident Evil, is it?

Some other points in the game have you driving around the place in a car, often shooting at other people in cars. It sounds fun, but it isn't. The first time I did one of those levels, I had no idea what I was doing at all, even after reading the manual, and I somehow got through by pure luck, pressing random buttons and hoping for the best.

Overall, the game's main play mode makes me think of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, only without most of the good elements. I have often put this game back on my shelf and not taken it off again for several weeks, even months.

Graphics - 5/10

For the Gamecube, the graphics are pretty poor. The locations look drab and uninteresting - as though whoever programmed this place wanted its inhabitants to be driven to suicide, or something. In just about every level, there seem to be similar-looking grey walls, and almost-identical corridors.

But the main problem is - the way everything is drawn looks incredibly bland for a system as impressive as the Nintendo Gamecube. They would be impressive on the Nintendo 64, maybe, but here, they look rather dated. The character models are rather uninteresting in normal play and don't look a lot better in the cutscenes. The only decent bits seem to be when you are watching the occasional scenes featuring the actual actors rather than the (badly) animated versions of them.

Sound - 5/10

I don't recall anything particularly remarkable about the sound - nothing you won't hear in just about every action game on the Gamecube. The voice acting isn't bad, but it's not terribly good either.

Story - 3/10

I think I get it. A bunch of people go into The Matrix and get turned into badly animated video game characters, then go and run through a bunch of buildings, while being attacked by Agent Smith Clones. In all honesty, I couldn't care much about the story.

A lot of video games, fanfictions and books that are spun off from a popular film or cult series seem very poor in quality and rarely live up to the standards of the fandom they are actually based on, and the same is true here - with a story that seems as though it was written by a group of thirteen year old Matrix fans who thought they were doing something really cool. Shockingly, it was actually written by the Wachowski brothers, writers and directors of the three movies.

The only connection I can see between this and the movie series is that - once again - people have been unknowingly put into the "Matrix", and a bunch of people are rebelling against them. The three characters featured and Ghost, Niobe, two people who seem devoid of almost any personality, and the slightly more interesting Sparks, a guy who sits around giving instructions to the other two. I don't think I've ever cared less about characters in a video game than I did whenever I have played this game.

Play Time/Replay Value - 3/10

You might struggle to even bring yourself to play this through once, with the lack of compulsion it brings. The game seems very repetitive (run through corridors, shoot Agents, bring down helicopter, run through more corridors, etc.). And don't forget that this stretches across a full TWO discs. There is a nice option to enter cheats, and the creators were nice enough to create a showcase DVD that actually gives away some of the cheats. However, if you're like me, you may very likely find yourself preferring to play your other Gamecube games in preference to this - yes, even Luigi's Mansion.

Final Verdict

I'd recommend renting rather than buying, unless you happen to be totally nuts about The Matrix - and even then, you may find yourself demanding your money back. This game also takes up 10 blocks on your memory card - and with that much memory, I'd have expected at least decent graphics (even Wario World managed that. I very nearly sold this game recently at one of my local branches of Game, having been told that if I sold four console games I could get a new one at a cheap price, but this game was given a stay of execution when the shop assistant informed me that I was one week too late. In all honesty, I regret buying this game at all.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 06/22/05, Updated 03/15/06