Singularity isn’t a game that blew my mind by introducing a new feature or idea but it was very polished and was enjoyable. The weapons all felt fun to use and there was a good amount of upgrades to get for them. The TMD device was alright to use but I didn’t find a real reason to use it and would have preferred having the knife for a melee option as it didn’t need ammo to use and it got replaced by the TMD whether you like it or not. There were some decent environmental combat options such as cryo tanks and explosive barrels. The story itself was decent but got a little convoluted near the end. I will say that I was surprised to have three options to fork the story at the end, especially one of the options that didn’t think it would let me do. I also liked finding audio recordings and secret messages on the walls to add back story and expand on plot points. The graphics are much like the game play in that nothing wowed me for the time period it was released at but nothing was below average or an eye sore either. It was all simply good and serviceable. One part I did really like was the weapon damage on enemies, I thought the bullet impacts were very well done. The game wasn’t overly difficult on normal outside of one fight. The hard option may have been more of a challenge but I have a rule against picking the hardest difficulty if you can’t move it down during the game.
I played Singularity on Linux using Wine and DXVK. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches. There are four graphics options and a v-sync toggle. Alt-Tab works. As I mentioned you can’t change the difficulty after the game starts. The game uses checkpoint saves, thankfully they’re pretty well spaced. One thing I didn’t like was that in order to quit the game you must quit to the main menu; back out to the first screen; choose quit and confirm it. I didn’t try to Alt-F4 so that may have been a quicker option but regardless it’s a convoluted process to exit the game. I couldn’t measure the frame rate while I played but I didn’t feel any lag spikes at all.
Game Engine: Unreal Engine 3
Disk Space Used: 8.1 GB
Game Version Played: 2.0.0.5 from GOG
Game Settings: All on except depth of field; 1920x1080
GPU Usage: 0-85 %
VRAM Usage: 597-980 MB
CPU Usage: 7-35 %
RAM Usage: 2.7-3.4 GB
Overall Singularity is good fun. It won’t wow you with innovation or beauty but it also isn’t clunky or buggy in any way. I finished the campaign on normal difficulty in six hours and twelve minutes. I originally paid $33.89 CAD for the physical copy. I don’t recall what I paid for the GOG version but it is easily worth it’s current price of $38.79 as the upper limit I would pay for it but still not overpriced.
My System:
AMD FX-9590 | 16GB DDR3-2133 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.1.7 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.19.10-zen1-zen | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz | Wine 7.18 | DXVK 1.10.3