I'd picked this game up a little while ago, since the reviews made it out to be "the game we wanted Enter the Matrix to be." That is to say, a game that hewed more closely to the plotlines of the movies, and that had a higher fun to dreck ratio. Also, the Agent Smiths turn into a giant robot at the end, after a little self-mocking cameo by stick figure versions of the Brothers Wachowski. (No, Really.) Unfortunately, it also turned out to be picky about my clearly non-standard Soundblaster Live! card, so I grudgingly went and picked up an SB Audigy, although, let's face it, the odds are that my gaming needs (with my little crummy two speaker setup) could possibly require the services of something more complicated than the cheapest of audio solutions are pretty low.

But yeah, I bought the card, then got distracted by other shiny things (as opposed to by the existing Shiny thing -- ok, that was a reach), and the card sat on my floor over the holidays. Yesterday, I finally picked it up again and installed it, and -- huzzah -- the sound works in the game now. So, imagine my bitter and yet somehow expected disappointment with the actual game.

I don't know if my expectations have shifted, but I seem to recall the one thing Enter the Matrix did OK was faces. The hullaballood scalable graphics meant that, sometimes, just sometimes, you saw some really pretty, highly detailed textures and pretty areas. That appears to have gone out in the window in the meantime. The main thing I noticed when turning the graphics slider up to 11 (well -- 8 -- they really should have made it max at 11) was the introduction of a "blur" effect that really just made the graphics seem lower rez than they were.

I was also looking forward to seeing movie footage interspersed with gameplay elements -- making it feel more like watching the movie with playable bits. However, the footage has been recut by somebody who gets bored watching MTV, to give you a little "previously on The Matrix" feel. Skip skip skip. Skip. Oh goodie, now I'm back to the savepoint-driven gameplay.

The gameplay itself is trivial. Jab the one and two buttons to create "combos." Get weapons that will break after a while, and don't have a significant impact on how your gameplay evolves. Do "stealth" content that involves moving from green highlighted area to green highlighted area. From the very get-go, the gameplay diverges substantially from the movies -- instead of getting caught by the agents, Trinity rescues you on her motorbike. Whoah. Bored now.

Once you get through the initial area. you're dumped into a tutorial that reads like the Quentin Tarantino fanboy theater. Learn how to do the four-hit combo! It's only a 20-minute tutorial against a Japanese sword master! I know sword-fu! Hmmm, wait -- I'm not sure I understand how to press the first button four times. Thank god the tutorial is 20 minutes. To be honest, this is where the game lost me -- I did 3 tutorials, and then discovered there were something like 30 of them. When I finally got to the end boss on the third tutorial, and lost, and discovered there was no checkpoint, I "jacked out." "Took the blue pill." "Went back to leveling up my rogue in Azeroth." Whatever the cool kids are saying these days.

So yeah, for the nonexistent person who (a) reads my blog and (b) might have gotten suckered into this game and (c) hasn't done it already -- um, don't do it. Go play God of War instead. Now there's a self-involved violent fantasy setting that I can get into.