The start of something great.
The premise of Emergence is the urgent attempt of John Blade, a freelance cop, to track down Viktor Radek and Elexis Sinclaire, the criminals who have altered his DNA and are planning to unleash a mutagen upon a futuristic megacity. In this short but intense first episode, you'll fight through a docks to reach a secret lab, defend yourself from hideous mutations, and fight a helicopter atop a skyscraper. At the same time, you'll discover your own new special abilities.
This story is told in the traditional Half-Life fashion of not giving away much information, and keeping you as in the dark as the protagonist. We've no idea why or how Blade was captured (the point where the game starts) by Radek and Sinclaire, or why Sinclaire is toying with him by manipulating his genes. There are a lot of unanswered questions for future episodes to answer. As with Half-Life, this method of storytelling not only leaves us gagging for the next episode, but what little we do know at any one time compels us to keep playing, either to find out more or explore the ramifications of our current knowledge. Unfortunately, they've also made Blade rather silent...perhaps he knows Gordon Freeman....
Yes, the rumours are true, we only get 3 weapons (4 if you include the grenades) and they are but the traditional trinity of pistol, shotgun and submachinegun, but the gameplay is still unaffected and the weapons are solid and fun to use. And that's before the secondary fire modes come into play. The pistol, while powerful enough in primary mode, fires a depleted uranium shell that can penetrate walls and usually kills most of the baddies in one or two hits. The shotgun's second mode fires a shell with larger pellets, that ricochet off walls, and are just as capable of bouncing back and hitting you. The machinegun fires good old fashioned impact grenades, as well as having a scope. All these weapons can be used as melee weapons and each one has the option of aiming down the scope.
This back-to-basics approach creates a very pure first person shooter, with you striving for headshots and making every shot count - not least because overall you can't carry that much ammo. The shotgun isn't quite powerful enough to make its ammo last long, and the machinegun's recoil means that you have to really concentrate to avoid wasting ammo - not easy when SiN's enemies have a habit of firing on you from all angles, and they throw their incendiary grenades as often as you do!
The twist in the tale (admittedly not so much if you're already familiar with the SiN series) comes with the appearance of mutants. Three varieties are seen - a small quadrupedal sort which spits poison (the better marksmen among us can shoot these poison blobs to pieces in midair) and mutated soldiers, who, while not particularly tactical, are quite speedy and will absorb more than a few shotgun blasts. The third type I shan't spoil....let's just say you'll be lucky to have much ammo left once he's down. All these mutants regenerate health if there are leaking barrels of mutagen around (it also damages humans) and are damaged by clouds of medical chemicals (neatly, there are medstations on the wall a la HL2, but you can also replace the canisters of chemicals if they run out - if there's no station around you can smash the canister open and soak up some health from the cloud of gas. It's not as efficient, but there are many times where that's your only option). Ritual have also tweaked the Source Engine so that gibbing is now possible, resulting in mutants being blown apart by shotgun blasts and grenades, and soldier's heads exploding with a headshot.
The real twist in the tale comes with the realisation that the mutagen that creates these monsters and is highly toxic to humans is not as toxic to you - in fact it enhances your reflexes - in gaming terms, this means the introduction of bullet time. This is to be used sparingly though - a few lungfuls of mutagen is good enough for barely 15 seconds of slowdown. Any more than that and you will start losing health. It's an interesting twist, one which is largely dependent on finding conspicuous barrels of green chemical lying about, and the visual effect of slowed time also gives you a bad case of tunnel vision.
The action seems to take place largely in the afternoon and evening, which leads to some fantastically coloured skies. It's a real shame that Valve's HDR wasn't around when this was released, as it would have appeared stunning. That aside, some of the vistas, for example the lighthouse and the view from the skyscraper are still awesome. The graphical quality elsewhere is superb - the new character models are well animated and there are some particularly gruesome new mutilated corpse models.
As far as music goes, there isn't much that's memorable during the game, but the signature track that plays during the main menu is of excellent quality.
Many user reviews of this game have not been particularly high. A lot of this can be put down to:
1. It's delivered on Steam, which is still hated
2. The amount of money you'll pay varies from place to place
3. It's only a (short) episode
While unfortunately nothing can be done about people whining about the first two objections, the third contains hope. SiN: Episodes does exactly what it says on the tin: It's episodic. Which means that in Emergence we see the start of what has the potential of being an epic game. There are eight (!) more episodes to come, and if at each break between episodes, Ritual do as they promise and sit down and listen to the suggestions of the fans, then this game will be up there with the greats.