steve kwan user experience designer

Review: The Matrix: Path of Neo

(November 22nd, 2005 - 8:06PM)

Keanu vs agents, except it's not Keanu.

(1 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: You have to admit this is a lousy game, regardless of your Matrix fanboyness.

Almost everything about The Matrix: Path of Neo is bad. And that's really quite a shame, because this game could have been excellent.

• The graphics are just appalling. Not every game can look as good as Half-Life 2, but there's a limit to what we can be expected to tolerate. Take a look at the screenshot above. Granted, that screenshot was taken at 800*600 pixels, which that brings me to my next point.
  
  
• The game crashed when I ran it at 1600*1200 resolution. The game is interspersed with video clips from the movie in between levels. These clips made the game crash. Sometimes I could skip the clips, but sometimes not. I was able to prevent the game from crashing by lowering my resolution to 800*600. This wasn't actually a huge problem, because the game looks awful at any resolution.
  
  
• The storyline jerks wildly around the plot of the three movies. Video clips from the movie are spliced into the game in a bizarre manner that I assume must be for style. In some places, the game deviates from the plotline in the movies. That doesn't really bother me, but it might bother others.
  
  
• Some of the additional content added to the game is ridiculous. The storyline has been expanded to include more of Neo's training and more details on other events in the movie. There's one point in the game where Neo and a girl in an S&M outfit fight off a bunch of human-sized red ants. Stupid scenes like this make the game hard to take seriously.
  
  
• Some dumb bug prevented my custom controls from being saved. Every time I started the game, I had to set my controls.

There's one good thing about this game: the combat is kind of fun.