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Enter the Matrix (2003) (VG)

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
This is not for gamers, but for movie fans., 27 February 2004
Author: mashby from Nashville, Tennessee - USA

All the reviews I've read say that the game sucks, so why buy it? One reason and one reason only - there's over and hour of DVD quality video in the game. This video isn't just snippets from the three films either. When the Wachowski's shot footage for the video game as they were shooting The Matrix Reloaded and

Do you have to play the video game in order to see the movies. No, just like The Animatrix, you don't have to have played the game in order to enjoy the movie. Yet, there are some very interesting story lines and back stories that you miss if you haven't played it. This content enriches your movie experience. I equate it to watching your favorite television show. Take "Friends" for example. You can sit down and watch any episode of Friends and know what's going on and have a good time watching it. Yet a lot of the enjoyment of the show is the fact that you know about Ross and Rachel's past, or the fact that Monica used to be fat. When you know these back stories, things that happen in current episodes are more enjoyable. "We were on a break!" doesn't mean anything to you if you haven't seen the previous episodes.

The first segment involves going to the post office to collect the package. The second segment involves going to the airport to call all the other captains for the meeting that appears at the start of The Matrix Reloaded. I was very surprised to learn how the captains use the Matrix to leave messages for each other and there is some very funny dialog. While at the airport, you are called upon to save a fellow crew, which greatly expands the level. The third segment involves the meeting of the captains and the subsequent escape after the agents show up. In The Matrix Reloaded, we see Neo fight the agents, but we don't see what happens with the rest of the characters. It's a bit more expanded in the video game. After this third segment, I would recommend that you stop here and watch The Matrix Reloaded. Or at a minimum, watch The Matrix Reloaded, then play the game and then watch The Matrix Revolutions

Throughout the game you're presented with the following elements:

1. Cinematics - through the use of DVD quality video, you see the story unfold with all the main characters from the Matrix Trilogy. They take a few short cuts with the special effects in places, but otherwise it's the same quality of footage as the movies.

2. Animatics - to help transition you from the movie to the game, often times a cinematic with change into an animatic. This simply means that the story unfolds in an animated version using the game engine to render the characters. These cut scenes are just as engaging as the video because they use the actual actor's voices.

3. Game Play - you do actually get to play the game as well. As either Niobe, or Ghost, you navigate your way through the game unfolding the story as you play.

It was no surprise to learn that the game play sucks. As a game, Enter The Matrix is dead on arrival. No matter how powerful your computer is, the game play is going to bog down to a crawl whenever there are a lot of enemies on the screen. The limited ability to save your games is going to cause you to scream more than once. Last but not least, the game play is simply not that engaging. It's very linear and thus you're really only going from point A to point B, press a button, or open a door and the level is over. I'll be honest, as a game, it's a turd.

But that's not the point. The reason for this game is not for you to play it over and over like Quake III, or Medal Of Honor Allied Assault. The purpose for this game is to tell a story. I don't know that a video game is the best medium for telling a story, but I have to give the Wachowski brothers credit for the attempt. To show you that the Brothers simply want you to get to the end, if you get to a point where you can rest, your health will automatically increase. Not just a little at a time, but in 20 seconds you can go from 2% to 100% if you simply stand still (and no one is shooting at you).

Other than the 1 hour of DVD quality video (have I said that enough yet?), the only saving grace is the audio in the game. Dane Davis, the sound designer for the Matrix Trilogies used the exact sounds from the movies. So when you're in bullet time and hearing the guns go off, it's just like you're there. It's weird when the sound effects are the most notable aspects of a game, but they are that good.

The music is also excellent. Don Davis, the composer for the Matrix Trilogies, composed music for the game as well. In addition, there are tracks from Juno Reactor, Chris Vrenna, Fluke, Rob D and others, that add a certain bit of adrenaline to the game play. Great songs to kick butt to.

If you're a die-hard Matrix fan, then I'd recommend buying the game if you can find it on sale. However, you don't have to be a gamer to play this game. Simple button mashing will get you through the game and through all of the stories - which is the point of the whole game anyway. Even if you're not a die-hard fan, the story arcs are good and worth slugging through the game to watch them.

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
OK, but flawed, 12 July 2003
Author: doc_gib from LV NV USA

This interactive counterpart to The Matrix Reloaded can be fun at times, but the gameplay is handicapped. The controls are not very manageable, the camera angles are often obstructive, and the auto aim is too inaccurate. Half of your bullets totally miss- understandable against agents, but sometimes you can't even hit regular cops worth a darn either. Hand to hand combat is fun, but even that can be tricky. The collision detection is awkward, for example the mid air roundhouse kick can hit anything within three miles of you, yet the grab and slam move often misses, with your character looking pretty stupid grasping thin air and getting shot in the face.

The focus makes things more interesting though.

This game could have been much better. Seems to be a cash-in on the movie, but at least it gives more story background. As it is, it's a marginal product. I give it a C minus.

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5 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
A real treat for Matrix fans, 8 April 2004

Author: Grann-Bach (Grann-Bach@jubii.dk) from Denmark

This game has pretty much everything you'd expect from a game about the Matrix; the cool kung-fu moves, the kick-ass gun-play, a multitude of cool weapons and, of course, the entire Matrix "feel" over it. The weapons are plentiful, though they could offer more diversity. If I had to guess, I'd say there were 15-20 different weapons, and most fall in the half a dozen or so main categories of guns in the game(pistol, submachine-gun, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper, heavy weapon). The kung-fu is surprisingly easy to control, and there is a huge amount of different moves. The graphics are very good, but they could have been better, had the game not been rushed to meet with the same deadline as Reloaded. Some of the animations don't blend too well with the others, and it's sometimes a little annoying to look at. Nothing major though. The "Focus Mode" allows you to do some gnarly stunts and moves, akin to those from the films, making for some incredibly entertaining game-play. The soundtrack is excellent, some tracks were slightly edited from the Reloaded soundtrack, others were taken directly from it, but most of the tracks were entirely new, and fit with the atmosphere and game-play perfectly. The game-play is also great, though it can get slightly repetitive at times, as most of the game consists of either fighting or shooting the enemies, which of the two you do being somewhat up to each individual player. The level design is pretty good, though also slightly repetitive. That was obviously a bit rushed, too. The driving portions are good, but could have been a little better. The control is reasonable, but inferior to all-out car games(even I can say that, and I hardly play any car games at all), and the computer-controlled car of the Ghost driving portion can be almost frustrating at times. A wicked cool feature would have been two-player, with one player driving and the other shooting, instead of just letting you do one, depending on which character you're playing as, since both have shortcomings(which is not at all to say that they aren't both very entertaining). One of the main problems with the driving portions, as well as the regular game, is the lack of freedom, freedom of movement, first of all. At the end of the game, you get to fly the hovercraft, which is very entertaining, and something most of us fans have, more or less secretly, hoped to be able to do some day, since we first saw the original movie(along with, well, just about everything else this game lets you do). The game changes pretty seamlessly between the driving and the regular levels, which can be annoying, but you quickly get used to it. The game can also be a bit hard to get used to, control-wise, but there are little "tips" that appear, every time you need to learn something new, and then you can read and re-read it whenever you want to. You play as either Ghost or Niobe, both of which appeared in the second two Matrix films, and their paths intertwine well with the second movie(if some of the places you get to visit do have a sense of "hey, this was cool to watch in the film, let's put the player in a similar situation!"). Something I thought could have been better is how different the two paths are... there are parts where one character goes one route whilst the other takes a different one, and I think this could have been more prominent in the game. I would still say that both are worth completing. Both have their pros and cons. There is also a neat little hacking game, which, like the hovercraft levels, is something that most fans have wanted to try. It's built up like a DOS command prompt, which makes it reasonably easy to play. The game also has some built-in tips for that, in case you get completely lost. If you master the hacking game, which isn't too hard for the average computer user, you can even activate a Katana sword, like the one Morpheus uses in Reloaded. There's also a cool bonus level, that makes for some great practice. The game takes approximately 2-4 hours per character, depending on how quickly you get good at it. That doesn't sound like much, but it's an intense couple of hours. Plus, you'll probably be going back to it. I've played the game through 8 times now, 4 times per character. And I'm not tired of it yet. Some of the levels do change a little from one of the two characters to the other, and I recommend that if you want the full story, and the full experience, you should beat both. This game is invaluable to play if you're wondering what happened to Ghost and Niobe when they weren't on-screen in Reloaded. It also explains a few more details, even some about Revolutions. The plot is fairly good, and has moments where it's *really* good. It starts before Reloaded, and ends not long after where and when the movie did(and tells the player how Niobe and Ghost wound up where we first see them in Revolutions). The hours worth of DVD quality cut-scenes offer some background and character development for the two leads of the game, both of which are qualities that the two Matrix sequels suffer from a lack of. For as good as this is, there is definitely potential for more... once again, had the game not been rushed, it could easily have been the perfect interactive Matrix experience. As it is, it's just a good contemporary Matrix game. A darned good one at that, but nothing more. I recommend this game to any fans of the Matrix trilogy, especially those who felt that Reloaded didn't explain enough, and those who've been wanting to immerse themselves completely in the universe the Wachowskis created, and pull of the fighting moves and so forth. Highly entertaining. 7/10

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5 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Amazing, 21 May 2003
Author: mdago88 from FSU

After seeing the movie, i started playing the game. It weaves in and out of the story of the movie, and adds its own never before scenes to move along the story. The hacking is fun to unlock, and the rewards are great (multiplayer fighting). Action, graphics, and in game script are great. It's a wonderful game to along with the movie. 10/10

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Great Game., 14 March 2005
Author: martinezkid234-1 (martinezkid234@yahoo.com) from United States

This is a very GREAT game! I absolutely love it!! Andy and Larry W. did a great job at making this game. Every time I want to play Xbox....this is the first game i play! Its really entertaining. It has clips of the movie.....which are very cool.Also I think the graphics of this game look perfect. I think this game is for all ages.Its just so fun to play. I played it for 8 hours ounce. It has great casting.Great graphs.Great levels. If you have 20$ or whatever you have in your wallet.........BUY THIS GAME RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!Its really worth to buy you know.It has every thing you want.Its real cool. I don't know how many levels there are though..........but there's a lot. Ghost and Niobe are both real cool.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
This was a top game!, 15 April 2006
Author: Skullcrusher from United Kingdom

This game was a mixture of both superstition and action you could do practically anything and everything that they had done in the wonderfully made films. The directors had even added more time on their hands to have the actors act out more to fill in the storyline of the game. This game also leaves you in suspense, like you don't know if an Agent will be right behind or something as chilling like that! But this game is truly something to believe in and is and wonderfully loved game around the country and others in it's wake. With this game it is truly carrying on the Wachowski brothers work for many generations along with the present game 'The Matrix: The Path of Neo'.

I thank you all for reading

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Adequate game with great hidden value., 27 October 2003
Author: Evil Iggy

Lets start by getting the negatives out of the way first.

1. The physics of the game are a little off in that the people don't react the solid objects correctly. Sometimes you will kill or incapacitate an enemy their body will be laying halfway inside a wall or laying flat as if they were on the ground but are actually laying on a one inch rail.

2. The sound in a few FMVs has some kind of echo problem that makes it hare to understand what the characters are saying.

3. Occasionally your character will perform a complex fighting move where they grapple with an enemy and knock them out except they don't pull off the first move correctly, i.e. getting a hold of the enemy, and they will perform the entire sequence of fight moves against thin air.

The first problem is understandable considering that MOST video games don't have accurate physics engines. The other two indicate that The Wachowski Brothers wanted it out in time for the release of Reloaded. The game came out 3/11/2003 and the film 3/15/2003.

Now for the good parts.

1. Other than these few problems the game is quite enjoyable and gives you a very in-depth look at the Matrix reality. Unlike most movie tie-in games this actually compliments the films rather than trying to imitate it or be a condensed version.

2. The game's plot line actually interweaves with the film Reloaded giving you a better understanding of the films complexities.

3. The use of focus power, or bullet time as it is also known, makes for some very impressive hand to hand and gun fighting. For those of you unfamiliar with the Matrix concept (if you don't know any thing about the films then why the heck are you reading about the game?) I will give you a prime example of bullet time so that you can understand the magnitude of being able to control this power.

Five minutes into the first Matrix film we see a woman dressed a black, leather biker's outfit with her hands on her head about to be cuffed from behind by a cop, there are three other's who all have guns trained on her as he approaches. Just as he touches her wrist she quickly spins around, breaks his right arm at the elbow and jams the palm of her hand into his face breaking his nose, all within one second. She then jumps 4 feet straight up into the air and time suddenly grinds to a halt. While time is frozen the camera view rotates 180º showing her poised like the Karate Kid ready to perform a crane kick. Time then resumes normal speed. She kicks the cop so hard that he goes flying backward about 10 to 15 feet into a second officer. She, defying the laws of physics, is not moved back at all by the force of her kick and simply lands back where she was. She quickly kicks the wooden chair she was sitting on into the face of a third officer, stunning him and shattering the chair. The fourth officer aims his gun at her and begins to fire. She runs up a wall along the corner of the room, again defying the laws of physics, and then runs back at the fourth officer ducking and weaving until she is in front of him. She then spins the both of them around until she is facing the third officer, now regaining his composure and taking aim, with the fourth officer behind her facing the same way and her hand controlling his gun. She fires a few rounds at the third officer, presumably killing him, and then whips her leg up kicking the fourth officer in the face over her own shoulder, incapacitating the last of her would be captors. This is what bullet time is about.

The game itself is sufficiently entertaining that if every thing about the matrix were stripped away from it and it were simply an action/adventure/fighting game with no connections to any other product it would still be a decent enough game to stand on it's own. The thing that makes this a good game is that it (like The Animatrix) is more like a compendium to the matrix than an entity unto it self.

All in all I would give this game a. 7.5/10 (10 being excellent, 0 being horrible and 5 being average).

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Hey, this game isn't done!, 10 July 2004
Author: Trashbag from Wauconda, Illinois

When "Enter the Matrix" came out, everyone was buying it, because everyone wanted to do everything they saw in the movie. For me, I got disappointed, because my copy was one of many copies that were bugged. The game seems to lock up after extended play, or if there is more than four baddies on-screen. And if you don't have an up to date PC, stay clear of this one. One of my friends started this up on an old emachines computer, and the results were more like a slideshow than a video game. The boring gameplay doesn't help either. Sure, the game lets you do bullet time, but even that gets boring after a while. What you pretty much do is this:

1. Disarm the opponents weapon

2. Beat the living daylights out of him or

3. Shoot him

4. Rinse and repeat

There are some driving levels, but the controls feel too sensitive so it's hard to stay on track. Then theres the graphics. Not only is the animation jerky, but the level design on most of the levels is just greusome, especially on the last level. I almost went blind! But there are some things that are good. The sound and the Hacking mini game, where you can cheat and do some other things real hackers do. But still, when the best part about a video game is the cheating menu, that game has problems.

A 2 out of 5

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Nice idea...don't do it again., 9 November 2003
Author: Nick from Oregon

When I first heard about this game and how it tied in with the Matrix movies I was very interested. Afterall, it sounded like a very unique idea. Unfortunately, I was interested enough to throw away $50 on it. Enter the Matrix is, hands down, the worst video game I have ever played: controls are terrible, graphics are crap, game play is frustrating. As I said, I did think this was an interesting idea--certainly more original than any other video game based off of a movie--and I still do think it is a neat idea. The only real problem was the execution. They spent more money on the rights to use character images than they spent on game design. I know what you're thinking: "but, they had to use images of Niobe and Ghost", but those aren't the character images I am talking about. I talking about the other characters that you don't actually get to play as. One official review I read stated that $10 million alone was spent in order to use the image of Neo. Just imagine what $10 million could have done for game development. If you're thinking of getting this game, do yourself a favor and spend your money on candy. Once again, this idea behind this game is a very good one, but what they failed to realize is that games must be playable.

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Gameplay sucks, but clips worthwhile, 6 November 2003
Author: Benjamin Kirk (BKred) from Ithaca, NY

Ok, first off I'm going to say that I got this game free, legally I might add. I was able to get a full rebate from Amazon a while back. And I'm also going to say that I'm glad I didn't end up paying for this. The gameplay was pretty bad, the graphics weren't much better, and the AI was absolutely atrocious. In the driving portions, when you weren't driving, you were lucky to get to the end in one piece. Another thing: square tires are bad; zooming in on clearly square tires is worse. Sure, you could do Focus moves, and they were cool, but they were also useless for the most part. You regenerated health fast enough that you could take a few hits while just running around killing everyone with no real negative effects.

That said, the extra footage/plot info was great. I really feel most of the dialogue in this game was better than could be found in the movies. I really wish Sparks and Ghost had been allowed some character development in the actual movies, Sparks in particular. And it was nifty seeing the Trainman reappear in the movie.

In the end, I'd recommend this game to any, at least slightly serious Matrix fan. But if you're looking for a good game, look elsewhere.

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