Sin was released with relatively little fanfare at approximately the same time as Half-Life. We all know what happened with Half-Life, and we all know that in comparison, Sin didn't sell very well, or receive particularly good review scores. This was mainly due to the game being rushed out (presumably to beat or match Half-Life to the shelves), as the initial release was plagued with numerous bugs - nothing completely show-stopping, but remarkably annoying bugs nonetheless. Pre-patch, loading times were upwards of a minute in some cases, on a computer that exceeded the recommended requirements. One of the midbosses had broken AI, and stood like a statue while you attacked him. Another dealt with broken scripts in the game's stealth level, which made sneaking successfully almost impossible. But those issues (and more) were patched within weeks of release by a dedicated team at Ritual and the resulting game was more than playable. It may have been a run of the mill first person shooter in some regards, but the exceptional level design and neat details helped elevate the experience considerably. Sin places you in the shoes of cop-for-hire John R. Blade with a computer geek sidekick named J.C. The plot follows multimillionaire Elexis Sinclaire and her plot to get the population addicted to her super-drug. The drug causes mutations, however, and your job is to stop production and distribution, and wipe Elexis out. The game itself plays like any other FPS, although for the time its hit detection was pretty cool - shoot a bad guy in the arm and his sleeve would rip and show blood. Shoot him in the face and...yeah. A shotgun blast to a weak enemy or one already riddled with bullets causes their torso to burst and their legs to flop down on the ground. Blood splatters are gooey and satisfying, with splats on the wall from every bullet that nicks your target. Weapons range from your standard pistol to shotgun, machine gun, chaingun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, plasma gun, and eventually a one-shot kills super weapon. Er...okay, maybe originality doesn't sit highly there, but all the weapons work well and none are particularly useless (even fist fighting is effective). The level design, however, is exceptional. The areas feel like real buildings but are also arranged in such a way that everything flows smoothly. The first level, as an example, takes place during a bank robbery, and the whole thing feels like a very opulent bank while still making it fairly obvious where to go next. The levels carry through that way for most of the game, with only a handful of more monotonous ones (the underwater levels are a bit sketchy). Some are standouts, however - the aforementioned bank, an oil rig, military missile base, warehouse, and underground science lab are all exceptionally cool to play thruogh, even if some of the locations feel a bit recycled. Your enemies are varied enough, although their strength is more in numbers than AI most of the time. A few larger ones are tougher to take down, and the final boss is certainly no pushover. The graphics work - the style is a little less realistic than Half-Life and feels more like a comic book, which suits the campy cutscenes well. Sound isn't very strong, however - the voiceovers are good (not great, but not horrible either) but the music is forgettable and the sounds of your weapons are woefully underpowered, and some don't even sound like guns at all. Thankfully, the shotgun sounds basically as it's supposed to and everything from its design to animation feels like a nice throwback to the original Doom. Then there are the little touches. If there's something in a room, chances are you can destroy it. Chairs, tables, lamps, posters, etc, and will explode with particles flying all over. Two enemies in a row can be taken out with a single headshot if aimed properly. Many levels have alternate exits and there are a few levels you may not come across at all on your first time through (unfortunately, one is the excellent missile silo). At one point, you're supposed to prevent the contamination of the city water supply. If you succeed, you go on to the next level. If you fail, you play an extra level where you try to stop the contaminated water from reaching the city. One of the coolest (and geekiest) touches, however, is with the computer terminals scattered around. You will have to access some of them to proceed in the game, whether it's to set up a hack program J.C. has given you, or open/close gates, or open records in the bank to find out the combination to the safe. Hitting the action key on a computer will zoom you into the terminal screen, and place you in a DOS-like environment. In fact, in the bank level, you can exit the bank program and use dir/p in a mini version of DOS, poke around in text files, and find out the account number and password for various game characters. A needed addition? No. Cool? Definitely. There is also an interesting training mode where you walk around your headquarters. In various spots are training simulators - one is a skeet shoot, where you walk into a side room, enter a small booth, and try and hit clay pigeons fired over your head. There is also a sniper range and an urban exercise where you stand on a moving platform and shoot wooden cutouts of criminals and avoid civilians. Each one allows you to record your highest score, which you can view on a computer terminal in each room. Again, unnecessary, but a neat touch. Sin is a lot of fun - the graphics may be a little rough around the edges and the audio isn't terribly good, but the gameplay is fun enough, the level design is excellent (well worth checking out alone), and the small touches help bring the game to life. It's also a blast multiplayer (or was, when people still played it), and a number of those maps - namely a 3D representation of an Escher-style stair room (complete with varied gravity in each section, so you could have people running up walls and on the ceiling) - are absolutely brilliant. It's a shame that Sin received so little attention next to Half-Life and saw next to nothing with regards to longevity.
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