Advent Rising

"Lots of potential, but lacking polish"

I first saw Advent Rising at the 2004 Electronics Entertainment Expo. The game impressed me with its cinematic look, intriguing story and colorful visuals. It made my list of top games of the show and I eagerly followed its progress for the next year. Early previews hinted at frame-rate problems and control issues, but I kept the faith. The game was planned as the first of a trilogy and I was sure Majesco would make sure that the first game was good enough to warrant sequels. The game saw multiple delays, but I took those as positives. I'll take delays over a rushed product any day. In the weeks leading up to the game's release I was extremely excited at the potential the dame displayed. The official trailers looked better than most Hollywood movies, the story sounded fantastic, and the graphics seemed to deliver a truly massive, cinematic experience. May 31st couldn't get here soon enough.

Fast forward to June 1, 2005. I get home from Gamestop, game in hand, dim the lights, turn up the sound, and sit back. Lets see what Advent Rising has to offer . . .

Turns out, the game has lots to offer. Too bad it stumbles in the delivery.

The entire time while playing Advent Rising I kept thinking of another game that I felt had enormous potential and just fell short because of technical limitations. Killzone. Both of these games have fantastic art design, great atmosphere, and lots of promise. Not to mention severe technical shortcomings.

Advent Rising aims for the stars. It has huge environments, fantastic set pieces, chaotic battles with multiple enemies and allies, it is set on beautiful alien worlds, enormous cities, various alien spacecrafts, and ancient ruins, gives you a multitude of upgradable weapons, super powers, slo-mo dodges, melee combos, fatalities, awesome reload animations, some nifty physics and an absolutely fantastic orchestral score. The only problem is when you mix all those elements together, you discover that the graphics engine running it all is far from capable of pulling it off.

Lets get one thing out of the way. The game has serious frame-rate issues. Anyone that says otherwise, does not know what the definition of “frame-rate” is. Whether the frame-rate problem bothers you, is up to you as an individual, but there is no denying that the problem is there. And for me, it was a big problem. The game chugs along constantly, often slowing to a crawl for what seems like absolutely no reason. The opening segment when you're walking around the space station in what seems like a pretty standard non-taxing level, runs so choppy you'd think that the game was processing millions of ploys, high res texture, complicated AI, physics and a thousand particle effects. It's not. You see groups of people here and there and they're engaged in conversation, but if that's enough to tax the graphics engine, then there is a problem.

The game seems to just lack polish. You'll encounter countless bugs that make you wonder if another delay would not have been in the game's best interest. Things such as when you lock on to a gun turent, after it blows up, your camera perspective stays locked in its direction and the only way to “unlock” your view is to go into the First Person mode for a second. Or how your character tends to get stuck on objects and go into his falling animation while hovering in the air. Or on how when your character walks into the ocean, he sort of just gets stuck. Or having an ally just walk right off a bridge to his death for absolutely no reason. Or how certain “events” won't trigger, forcing you replay a segment of the game. Or having an enemy freeze on the screen and just stay there like a invulnerable statue. Or having your character get stuck in mid animation after using Aeon Pulse and staying frozen in the air. There are a countless number of these types of glitches, that are small, annoying, and frequent enough to hint that the game was released far too early and was unfinished.

One of the game's strongest points is its story line. But even here the game fumbles, with some poorly directed cinematics that tend to suffer from the before mentioned frame-rate problem. Overall the cinematics seem a bit rushed and don't do the best job of telling the story. Most of the time after starting a level after a cinema I had to go to the pause menu to see what my objectives were, because I sure didn't get them from the cinematic. In one scene towards the beginning of the game when the Seekers are bombarding a human city, they show many humans running for their lives. All of them have the exact same running animation and they are all running in sync, not to mention there is only about two different models used, one for females and one for males. It's this type of lack of polish that upsets me. There are also many “filler” cinematics that are so obviously thrown in to allow the game to load the next section. These scenes are extremely uninteresting and seem to dwell on one scene for what seems like a millennium. For example, there's a certain cinematic that kicks in while you're on the Seekers' ship and it just shows a battle between the Seekers and Aurelians in some corridor. You can barely tell what's happening, there is an insane amount of laser fire in the air that is really hitting nothing, and this scene just goes on and on and on showing absolutely nothing of interest.

Audio-wise we have a very mixed bag as well. On one hand, you have a beautiful orchestral score and some pretty good voice acting. On the other hand, the audio mixing is completely out of whack. The score tends to cut out at abrupt times, especially when going to or from a cinematic. It can be jarring. The dialogue fluctuates from loud to low and makes some of the conversation in-game hard to hear and sometimes the sound effects seem to be non-existent. The more glaring audio fumble I encountered was when you and the Aurelians are making a direct assault on the Seekers which are based on an island in the Aurelians' home world. The opening of this level seemed to have the potential of being truly amazing, since you're assaulting the base from the beach in a scene reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan. But yet again, the technical problems show their ugly head, with the game chugging along and worst of all, the audio suffering some severe problems, almost as if there was so much to compute that the game decided not to bother with the sound. I expected to hear laser fire and explosions all around me. Instead, I got almost complete silence. It was almost surreal making myself up the beach, seeing the chaos around me (when the frame-rate let it be shown) and hearing nothing. I would hear maybe one gun firing at a time, but talk about killing the atmosphere and mood of the scene.

Ok, so far I have done nothing but bash the game. Did I even enjoy it at all? Yes, I did. That's the problem. It has the framework in place to be a truly great game. The flick-targeting works well. Not perfect, but pretty damn good considering it's an all new targeting system. Leveling up your character is lots of fun. Gideon's powers are a blast to use and while some might complain that they make the game too easy, I think that's the point. Once you acquire your powers you feel like a total bad-ass and your character becomes almost God-like in his abilities. Hell, that's why the Aurelians revered humans in the first place, so it was very fitting. There were lots moments where the developers tried some pretty mazing things. When you first land on the surface of Edumea, you need to make your way to the city and you have this HUGE environment to traverse. The segment when you're on the Seeker's ship and it's falling apart as you're running through it could have been one of the greatest moments in gaming. Could have been. But again, the engine wasn't up for the jog.

I hate to sound like I'm just tearing the game a new a-hole by continually complaining about it's technical flaws, because for the most part I did enjoy the game. But when I feel that those same technical flaws affect a game by more than just delivering substandard graphics and sound, but by hindering its atmosphere, controls and taking the player out of the gaming world by constantly reminding them that they're playing a game because of bugs or hiccups, I find it to be a great shame. Because I'll say it again, the game shows great promise and lots of great ideas.

All in all, Advent Rising was a game that failed to deliver the grand vision its developer had. Instead of a genre defining masterpiece, we got a decent 3rd person shooter that gets kudos for trying new and innovative things. I do hope that the trilogy continues. The story is good enough to see to the end. The play mechanics are solid and can be fantastic if fine-tuned. The art style is different, delivering a sort of anime inspired look that I enjoyed. If the sequel comes out for X-Box 360, or PS3, if they can just include this first one again as a bonus, and just fix all the bugs, have it running at 60 fps and in high-res, then the original vision the developers had can be truly seen and the game can be the revolutionary experience it should have been. Until then, here's hoping the series continues and that the experience GlyphX acquired making this first installment helps them deliver a truly great sequel.

Gameplay - 7.5
Graphics - 6
Music - 10
Sound - 5
Overall - 7

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/07/05