The Final Word game review

Enter the Matrix -- Atari/Shiny Entertainment

R.I.P.
This is probably one of the worst games I have ever played in pretty much every way except for the story. Also, my complaints here are not GameCube specific, from what I've seen all three versions are pretty much equal.

First off, let's start with the game camera. When I got this game the initial idea was that my wife would play through as Niobe, and I would play through as Ghost... That idea died about 10 minutes into the game when my wife had to run from the room feeling like she was going to throw up from the motion sickness triggered by the camera. We tried this a couple more times and she ended up leaving me to work on the game by myself. In the end, she could only pop back in when I called for her to watch a cut-scene or cinema. While she really wanted to take a crack at unlocking the Niobe specific content, we had to eventually concede that it was not going to happen. If we wanted to see the other content, I was going to be the one to play it since she physically can't. This really pissed me off and continues to even now as I don't have a lot of money to waste on crap games that drive family members out of the room when I sit down to play. Especially when it is a game that everyone is interested to see the story from.

The art and textures in the game were pretty average for this type of title, although I really had expected alot better from Shiny. The game camera is the second worse that I have ever seen surpassed only by Conker which has THE worst game camera ever. The sound in the game is pretty much average. Playcontrol is pretty abysmal and the hand-to-hand fighting elements of the game sucks hardcore. I mean, why did they even bother including the bonus fighting game levels? They are absolutely terrible and an embarrassment.

In fact the single and absolutely only reason I kept pushing on through this game is because I am a fan of the Matrix movies and wanted to view all the additional story content provided in this game (and wow, there is a ton of character development and back story in there that really enhanced Reloaded when I watched it again recently). If it wasn't for the story I would have ditched the game (a rare honor only ever bestowed on one game ever in this house) and demanded a refund from the store I bought it at. It is so absolutely terrible that it is infuriating me again just thinking about what I had to suffer through to solve the stupid game and open up the story content.

It is an total shame that Shiny took this on and prevented someone who actually cared about doing a good game from working on it. I am certain that monkeys on crack could have made a more entertaining piece of software. I swear if I ever knowingly run into any of the Shiny staff involved with this game at a tradeshow it's going to be all I can do to not spit on them for ruining what should have been an awsome license. They could have atleast had the courtesy to publish some kind of open all levels/cinema code (if there is one let me know as I have yet to find it) so that people wouldn't have to suffer through this complete and utter toilet scraping of a game.

Hopefully someone will splice together all of the FMV and relevant in-game cut-scenes from this game at some point and put the movie out for people to download... just to save other poor gamers from having to suffer through this title to get to the good stuff. Fact is, it is the story alone that brought this game's "Overall" number up from a zero to a one. I would love to give it higher points for the story, but the rest of the game is just so bad that I can't in good conscience do it.

I'll be honest the only thing in this title game wise that I actually enjoyed was the little hacking mini-game off of the title screen that you play to unlock all the bonus content. Yes, the text only hacking game was more fun than the two discs of graphical game. Pretty sad.

GRRRR!!! I am thoroughly disgusted...

(11/2003)