It currently seems to be a golden age for last gen games. I was amazed upon going in my local Gamestation to see so many PS2 and X-box games at ridiculously cheap prices, it was like the golden age of cheap Megadrive and Super NES games all over again.

I spent around £30 on around 15 games. One of these was 'Enter The Matrix' on X-box which cost me the crippling price of £1.99.

I liked the first Matrix film, I thought the 2nd and 3rd ones were complete dross, added to that the fact that film licences are usually god awful I had never had any incentive to want this game based on the 2nd film. I had heard that the game was pretty mediocre.



I found the game almost humiliatingly addictive, I just could not stop playing the damn thing! It is real fun, despite it's many faults. The combat is really simple, but really easy to do as well, as in the close range fighting anyway. 3 different buttons and lots of different combinations makes me a happy guy.



The game is a good use of a film licence in that it adds to the film rather than just tries to emulate the film. You take control of one of either 2 minor characters from the film - a bloke called Ghost, or some woman called Niobe. I had hoped that thier levels would be completly different from one another, but it seems that they are quite identical, and only vary in slight ways, too slight for me to bother finishing the game for a 2nd time.

For the game original scenes using the actors were filmed, all very good I guess if you like your Matrix stuff, though these additional scenes all look very low budget and usually just involve a few people standing around chatting.



There is more variation in the game than I was expecting. The game is at it's best when doing straight forward 3rd person action scenes. Also included to spice things up are sniper levels (sorta good), on rails shooting sections (bit too easy, but not bad) and driving levels (damn the driving controls are crap! Twitch mania). Also there is a cool few levels in the middle of the game which turn into some Buffy clone.

Onto the not so good stuff. The shooting of which there is a lot is not that great, I never actually looked into the options to se if it was possible, but auto aiming did my head in at times.

The locations are amazingly bland. It's like the team designing the game came up with a big list of possible locations and then chucked away all the ones which sounded like they may be interesting. So lots of time is spent in sewers, factorys and other generic and dull locations.

Greys and browns are the most prominent colour in the game, nearly everything is damn grey! I swear in places I just simply could not tell what were walls and what was the floor, it all melded into one so it looked like I was groping my way through some vortex dimension. One time on a driving level I kept driving into a solid wall as it closely resembled the road so much!

As much as it had it's faults you really cannot complain at £1.99. The game is surprisingly long, and is very addicitve to its fun fighting controls, so yeah, was cool enough.