The Matrix: Path of Neo

"Almost got it..."

Certainly, this game has to be better than the alleged debacle known as "Enter the Matrix," but that's only for the player to decide, really. I played ETM, and despite it's lukewarm reviews, I still managed to pull some enjoyment out of it...somewhere between a 6 and a 6.75. Hoping that Path of Neo will get the things right that ETM has done wrong, I decided to borrow the game from a friend after he had already bought it and beaten it senseless. At this point in time, I'll say this...the game starts off good, but only a warrior will want to battle to the end.

GRAPHICS----
The graphics are fairly standard. They're nothing better or worse than I expected. Character models look disturbingly blocky and tasteless, but one thing I've noticed was that if they are shed in light, you see an over-abundance of hair-gel on them. Yes, the game has lighting effects, but these effects look like no one's spent any more than a few minutes working on them. For some strange reason, Neo is the only person in the game with his own shadow. Everyone else will run around with no shadows at all, not even if they're bathed in light. I don't know if the developers missed this, or they just didn't care. The level design is pretty good, though, ranging from the Merovingian's confusion maze, to the glitched train level. The animations, on the other hand, still seem limp and lifeless. There are almost no animation transitions for enemies, so if they want to grab you for CQC, they'll just do it. Unfortunately for the whole game, though, the framerate is not steady. In ETM, at least the framerate was smooth. Here, framerate feels like it drags on a few areas of the game. This framerate also makes fighting difficult since you, the player, have to adjust to the framerate in order to keep a clear head during a battle. With the framerate stuttering while you're dodging your way around an enemy, it throws everything off.

SOUND----
I can understand if a game has a few sound glitches in it, but this is just insane. I've played through the entire game and found a really sizable amount of missing sound bytes. For example, at the Burly Brawl battle, if you knock down one of the buildings, you don't HEAR it. I thought this was just a glitch too, but it happens every time I play this stage. It can't be because I turned the "music" volume down, though, since that's the SOUND. The guns don't necessarily sound convincing...at least not all of them. I liked the weapon sounds in ETM better, but once you get melee weapons, hearing it whoosh through the air is a plus for that. Another problem is the voice-acting. Though the voice-acting itself is pretty good, almost none of the original actors reprise their roles here. Only Lawrence Fishburne makes due on his role, but such actors as Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss have been replaced by lesser-known actors. I've seen these actors in other places before, and I'm not ragging on them, but were the original actors too full of themselves to reprise their own roles? Probably so. I thought I heard Reeves and Weaving in the game's commercials, but I kept getting the weird idea they didn't sound exactly like them. Now, I KNOW it wasn't them.

GAMEPLAY----
Two steps forward, on step backward. Yeah, it's usually one forward, two backward, but there are things this game does better than ETM, but doesn't excel in very much in its own defense. Let me just say that the controls for this game are the dumbest idea for control schemes ever made. You can switch between three different schemes, but none of them are very different. This will make your hands dance all over the controller wildly, desperately hoping the current gunfight won't be your last due to the weird controls. You get an auto-aim button, which throws a lot of things off. You can hold it, but you still have to shoot, dodge, and jump with the X, Square, and R1 buttons. So, if you want to get through a gunfight, you'll have to sacrifice one function altogether. If you want to dodge and shoot, you can't auto-aim. If you want to jump and shoot, both the index finger and the middle finger must be planted on the shoulder buttons with your thumb on X, but you can't dodge. Like I said, the controls can be changed, but with little insignificant differences across all three control schemes.

Sick of shooting things? You can always try hand-to-hand combat. While it's certainly more robust than ETM's combat system, it's still easy to use. As you use points to acquire new moves and attacks, during a fight, you'll get on-screen prompts to tell you which button combination is best suited for the current situation. This perhaps makes fighting a little too easy, but this only made me question why developers even bother to put robust combat in these games. It's not like you're going to use every ability at your disposal when button-mashing works just fine. Hand-to-hand is almost the most aggravating part of combat. Because of enemies' awkward transition animations, they can pull off grabs whenever they please, even if they weren't facing you to begin with. If that wasn't bad enough, some enemies can get a hit off you even if you've just danced circles around them. Take the shielded SWAT officers, for example. If you manage to slip around them, they'll still spank the hell out of you with their big honkin' bulletproof shield. It's only a matter of luck fighting them, since direct attacks will kill you, and dodging will just buy you time before your inevitable death.

One other thing is the level design. As I stated before, the game starts off really well, but after the second half, it becomes more of a question of how long you're willing to last before you stop playing. As expected, you have to choose either the blue pill or the red pill. Then, you're sneaking through cubicles, avoiding Agents and police officers. After that, you're on the rooftop dodging bullets and fighting Agents off it. You're even manning a chaingun to save Morpheus. After the second half, when things start getting weird, things also start getting tedious. All you're doing then is fighting bosses and underlings, eventually facing off against Smith in a somewhat weak final battle. The REAL final battle--the one the Wachowskis re-wrote for this game--is something you'll have to decide for yourself. I just wouldn't expect this final battle to win any "Big Boss" awards, since the fight is easy once you figure out what needs to be done.

And the one fight that people were wondering about...the Burly Brawl. No, it's nothing to write home about, no matter how many gameplay movies of it you've seen. I was expecting to like it since the BB was my most favorite part out of the second film, but when I actually did the fight, I wasn't impressed. I hoped to literally take on hundreds of Smiths at once, knocking them into the air as the camera panned up to watch them sailing in a Burnout 3 Takedown-like fashion. But, no, thanks to the limitations of current-generation hardware, you can only take on about five or six Smiths while the rest of them are skittering around in their pre-rendered badness. That was probably the biggest disappointment of the whole game. In fact, it's one of THE most disappointing gaming moments I've ever been faced with.

STORY----
The story is as you would expect...it follows Neo as he tumbles down the rabbit hole...okay, enough of the rabbit hole puns. I'm sure that by now, you've heard almost every rabbit hole pun ever created. However, the story does follow Neo's adventure throughout the Matrix trilogy. Unfortunately, the weaving of the three stories is pretty bad. Once you get a live-action cutscene, a bunch of random scenes are edited together in rapid succession, giving you absolutely no idea of why you're even being shown all this stuff. I guess the developers just didn't want to leave anything out, even if it meant cutting and pasting everything in out-of-place orders. I would have preferred that they left out the non-important parts and just stuck with showing you would you "need" to see, such as preludes to battles and such.

BOTTOM LINE----
If you're a Matrix fan, no doubt you will go running after this. However, if you're a non-Matrix fan but want something out of your action games, you can do better than this. I would suggest to everyone, though, that a five-day rental may be in-place if you're insisting on checking this one out. 7/10.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/23/06