Ugly duckling is a series of posts talking about games that could’ve been great, but were not.
Some licensed tie-in games are loved, some are forgotten. Some are fun to play, some are not. Some are very budget minded and simple, some are ambitious. The games based around The Matrix were ambitious and quite curious. Though, perhaps, the most successful and arguably fun of them was The Matrix Online, that I won’t be talking about here. Still, both action titles in the franchise – Enter the Matrix and The Matrix: Path of Neo, – were games I was considering replaying for a while now. Intrigued if I will like them more than I did back when they just came out. And I suppose I did. Though, not by much.
Enter the Matrix was released as an integral part of The Matrix franchise, alongside The Matrix Reloaded and The Animatrix. Thus, it fills in the gaps that explain some of the events from the movies (that didn’t really need an explanation, but these don’t feel forced nonetheless). And it also features more scenes that were shot alongside the movies, but focusing on the main cast of the game – the crew of the Logos ship. Both Niobe and Ghost, that have relatively minor appearance in the movies (especially Ghost), are playable and there are some differences depending on the character selected.
Sadly, only some, as the vast majority of the levels plays exactly the same, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having this grand “what they were doing when Neo was doing that other thing” idea. And also makes completing the game with both characters especially frustrating. But what is the game like? It’s a third person shooter brawler with some rather nifty ideas. Which, however, have been already explored in the fan mods for Max Payne before. Granted, I’d argue that the transitioning between melee and shooting in Enter the Matrix is more fluid and fun than what any fan made mod could do, but at the same time, I can’t say that Enter the Matrix does what it does especially well either.
It does feel cool and similar to the movies how you go through whatever ranged weapons you pick up, which don’t typically last too long, to then seamlessly kung fu your problems away and get more guns, all while turning the “Focus” on and off, thus enabling and disabling the bullet time, which here makes characters more powerful. Health regenerates when outside of danger, which is also a nice touch that was yet to become the norm for games like this. And melee combat actually feels quite fine. Not fantastic or particularly deep, but fine. Plus, the game had a pretty decent cover system idea going for it for the time, since this was before this idea became normalized.
What kills the fun of the game is the levels and scenarios you’re dropped in. Most levels and environments in general are incredibly dull and samey, some are also huge and easy to get lost in with no clear indication of a goal, so you just try to enter every door hoping that it will open. There are horrendous “protect the characters” segments, where said characters have health and die very quickly. There are disgusting driving segments and in fact the single worst level in the game and one of the worst levels I’ve had experienced in my entire life is an escape from the twins from Reloaded if you play as Ghost. The car is then driven by the AI and that AI has absolutely no idea how to avoid any sudden obstructions. So if it hits something once, you have a pretty high chance it will then proceed to infinitely try to ram a column or a wall or will just stop completely requiring you to restart the level. This happens a lot.
For this reason, when playing as Niobe, which I’ve played second, I’ve just enabled the infinite health cheat because I had no desire to go through the mostly same game again without cheating. Cheating, by the way, is done via a fake terminal where you “hack the matrix”, which is a really cool touch and I wish more games did this (or had official cheats at all, this is a lost art sadly). And while it is curious to see more about the world and the characters and how it all expands the story, it doesn’t really add much, often repeats itself or the beats from the movie and isn’t worth suffering through the terrible levels this game has. Oh and the sound is terribly implemented with most of the music cues sequenced incorrectly and never forming a perfect loop, which I remember being the case even at launch. Though by now playing it on PC is a bit of a pain. It could be fun to see this game redone entirely some day, because the concept is neat, but Enter the Matrix, as it is, is a frustrating mess.
One of the biggest complaints the game received, though, was that you couldn’t play as Neo or any of the “main cast”. In fact, Neo didn’t even appear in Enter the Matrix apart from two movie scenes. So two years later, The Matrix: Path of Neo got released and it was all about Neo. And I hate myself for going through the torture of playing this game again, because Path of Neo is insufferable.
The game feels like a deliberate cruel joke designed by a game studio that was on its way to closure and franchise creators who felt burned by the poor reception the last two Matrix movies received. Everything in this game seems almost intentionally terrible and going out of the way to show how it hates the player. That, or it was so poorly designed with absolutely no sense of self-awareness that it looks intentional.
The basic combat concepts from Enter the Matrix are made more complex, but in the most meaningless way and as a result all shootouts and fights simply last longer without ever feeling satisfying. Enemies just have more health just so Neo could pull off more combos on them, despite the fact that the lock on is still terrible and uncontrollable and this time you can’t even properly and naturally switch between melee and ranged combat. Not that the ranged combat is even meaningful most of the time – it plays an important part in the few early levels but then becomes almost a nuisance in the rest of the game. To address the complaint about boring maze-like levels, the game now features completely linear series of arenas, apart from a few levels that are still pointlessly huge, yet now try to do “puzzles” as well, being even more frustrating to play. At least the driving sections are gone, but you still have to protect stupid AI from time to time. Oh and also the game starts with a few stealth levels, despite the fact that those are only stealth levels in the game.
Being more focused on what happens in the movies, instead of what was unseen, the game also does a terrible thing, where a cute memorable sequence from a movie that lasted under a minute is lengthened into a 20 minute level for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The game is openly aware about how stupid this is and attempts to combat this with “humour” by breaking the fourth wall multiple times. Fight with Seraph takes forever and gets to a point, where Neo fights Seraph in a movie theater that shows their fight from a movie, while a fat movie nerd from the front rows spouts movie quotes and backseats the fight. The training of Neo, that is left completely off-screen in the original movie, is now several pointlessly long levels that reference different martial arts movies and have Neo claim just how much of a good gamer he is.
The final confrontation, quite infamously, is interrupted by The Wachowskis who say that a video game should have a big boss fight instead of a sappy sacrifice at the end, call you a badass and the game then proceeds to show the onw of two CGI cutscenes in the game where all the Smiths combine into a giant Mega Smith which you then must fight. After you win that horribly tedious fight the second of the CGI cutscenes plays, which then abruptly cuts to the end of the third movie while Queen’s We are the Champions plays. It’s like a shitpost in videogame format. An expensively produced videogame.
But honestly, if any of the gameplay was good and not entirely painful to go through, you could probably stomach all of the stupidity of the game. But no, there’s not a single redeeming thing in this game, unlike Enter the Matrix which at least tried to do something different. It’s also incredibly hideous for the time of release and plays on PC even worse than the previous game, though it has to be noted that the PC port actually lacks some of the visual features that were on the PS2 original. If you were ever considering checking this game out – don’t. Infuriating garbage fire.