steve kwan user experience designer

Review: SiN Episodes: Emergence

(May 28th, 2006 - 12:35AM)

BOOM headshot

(4.5 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: A great new method of game production delivers a great new game.

SiN Episodes: Emergence probably makes history as the first first-person shooter ever delivered incrementally. Valve is calling this episodic gaming. Instead of packaging and releasing full-length video games, Valve is now releasing shorter "episodes" over their Steam service. So rather than releasing a large game every several years, developers can release a shorter episode every few months.

Ritual Entertainment is clearly on the Valve bandwagon, as SiN Episodes: Emergence uses Valve's Source engine, and is released over Steam.

As a software engineer, I think this is so cool! It's basically iterative development, but on a large commercial scale. Instead of developing an entire game and then selling it, developers can develop part of it, sell that part, develop the next part, and sell the next part. Developers can then adapt to user feedback a lot quicker and more effectively than with full releases.

So does episodic gaming work? If SiN Episodes: Emergence is any indication, then yes. Yes it does.

Things I liked about SiN Episodes: Emergence:

• The combat is fast, frantic, and fun. This game is what Halo could have been.
• The weapons are so much fun to use! Granted, there are only three: a magnum, a shotgun and a machine gun. Some people might complain about the lack of variety here, but each of the weapons is implemented so well that you don't feel like you're missing out.
• I don't think I've ever seen a game that scales difficulty this well. When you start a new game, you set two difficulty options: the overall difficulty, and how quickly the game re-adjusts the difficulty if you're having trouble. As you play, the game adapts to the difficulty level you're comfortable with. It's a great system. My only complaint is that you can't change your difficulty settings part-way through the game, so if you realize halfway through that you set the difficulty too high, then you have to start over from the beginning.
• The headshots in the game are gruesome and satisfying. Shooting an enemy in the head is like smashing a watermelon. Some of your enemies wear helmets that make headshots more difficult. No fair!

Things I didn't like about SiN Episodes: Emergence:

• It's short. Of course, I knew that going in: this isn't a full game, it's just an episode. And for the $20 price tag, I guess I can't complain. But it's still short.
• It's a Steam game. Anyone who's had experience buying or activating a game on Steam knows why this is a bad thing. I had quite a time getting Steam to accept my credit card.
• This game was made using the Source engine, and it really, really looks like it was made using the Source engine. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but the game is visually very similar to Half-Life 2. A little variety would have been nice. Which brings me to my next point.
• Compared to Half-Life 2, the graphics just aren't up to snuff. They're good, but they're not spectacular. From a visual standpoint, the game looks like Half-Life 2 but without some of the sizzle.
• Each weapon has a secondary fire option, which is almost useless in most cases.