So, you’re looking for a good game to play in your free time, eh? First, let me recommend you all find one of the wonderful people who have X-Boxes and get in some multiplayer Halo 2 action. I haven’t played the game enough to review it yet, but I can recommend you play it with some good friends around a warm television. Now, on to the review for this week.

There are times in a man’s life when he looks back on boyish pleasures such as dipping pigtails in inkwells and chasing rabbits with a certain fondness. Sometimes, he may even be moved to try these activities again in adulthood, hoping to recapture the magic. Often, as in the case of chasing rabbits, this proves just as entertaining as when he was a lad. Sometimes, as with dipping a grown student-colleague’s pigtails in an inkwell, the experience has changed somehow over the intervening years.

Unfortunately, the game I’m reviewing today is of the latter category. I enjoyed Siphon Filter greatly the first time I played it—I spent hours on its tactical combat situations, puzzling out what it was I should do next on each of its labyrinthine levels. The second time around, it was pure Hell.

In Siphon Filter, you play A Dark, Mysterious Secret Agent (he has a name, but it’s totally unimportant) who begins the game as a happy servant of the people and ends as a cynical, brooding asshole. You are joined by A Peppy, Useless Female Character, who tells you somewhat useful stuff during the mission, but usually just calls you to make chit chat every once in a while. Your boss, The Man, sends you on missions without filling you in on the details and inevitably betrays you, as The Man is prone to do.

It should be noted that the script and voice acting are as bad as you can get in a game not translated from a different language. Everything is a condensed, crystallized stereotype of every bad spy movie and special agent video game ever. Absolutely nothing interesting or surprising happens in the plot—every betrayal is immediately apparent, every plot twist is clear miles before it actually happens.

The game play is actually rather unique—a third person action shooter that allows you to zoom in to first-person in order to score headshots, a skill that becomes very necessary in later levels, where all the enemies are equipped with flak jackets. A variety of weapons are available, although because any of them can score a headshot, there’s no reason not to just use the gun with the highest rate of fire.

The enemies use a unique system of targeting in which the longer you are exposed to their fire, the higher their “aiming bar” gets; when it’s full, they begin actually scoring hits. In early levels, this leads to ridiculous situations in which you are facing a thug for five seconds, doing nothing, before he can score a hit. In later levels, when enemies fill their bar in less than a second, this can be very frustrating.

Level design is pretty atrocious after the first four levels—textures and architecture becomes repetitive and areas lack character. Moreover, mission layout is haphazard—too often you are dropped into a map with no real idea of what you’re supposed to do, or where you’re supposed to go. It is as if the designers have thrust you into a rat-maze and are studying how long it will take you to get out.

I really can’t emphasize enough how frustrating the designers have made this game—beyond the pale of mere challenge, they instead have created stupidly difficult scenarios that require far too much repetition in order to overcome. An example: a pitch-black cavern, littered with guards and instant-death bottomless pits. If you use a flashlight, the enemies instantly nail you, seemingly unbothered by the total darkness. If you don’t use your flashlight, you run straight into the enemies, or plummet to your doom. The only way to complete the area is to creep, literally inch by inch, using the aim function with a night-vision rifle, so as not to overrun an enemy or a pit; the process took me about two hours to complete.

So, in summary: don’t play Siphon Filter. It’s not good. The first four levels are mildly entertaining, but they’re only there to suck you into the horrible morass of repetitive death and hopeless wandering that is the rest of the game. Instead, let me recommend MotherLoad, a light-hearted and addictive Flash game available for free on the interweb at (http://www.xgenstudios.com/play/motherload/). It is good. Siphon Filter is not.
 

Highs: The graphics are ok, some of the game play elements aren’t terrible.
 

Lows: If you actually try to play the game, you will want to die.
 

Final Rating: 60%