Remembering Singularity, Raven Software's forgotten shooter

Singularity™

FIGHT THE PAST TO SAVE THE FUTURE. STOP THE SINGULARITY. Learn the truth behind a massive cover-up of the catastrophic SINGULARITY, an event that fractured time and threatens the world as we know it. Armed with powerful, advanced weaponry and the experimental Time Manipulation Device, fight enemies from the past, the present, and...

You may remember Singularity as the game Activision wanted to forget. Developed by Raven Software - formerly the creators of Heretic, Soldier of Fortune, and Jedi Outcast - Singularity was released in 2010 with minimal fanfare. It received mostly respectable reviews but sold poorly, in no small part because Activision kicked it out of the door with so little support it made Universal Credit look like winning the lottery.

It was a truly bizarre sequences of events, almost as if Activision wanted the game to do badly. The tragic irony is that Singularity is a more interesting singleplayer FPS than every Call of Duty Activision has released since Modern Warfare, combining a high-concept, time-hopping story with oodles of clever mechanics, and a weapon-roster to rival Bulletstorm and Titanfall 2.

You play Sergeant Renko, a special operative dispatched to the Russian island of Katorga to investigate anomalous readings picked up by a US satellite. Once there, you discover a crumbling Soviet facility dedicated to researching a substance known as E-99, more powerful than the atom bomb and twice as volatile. Indeed, only an accident at the facility in 1955 spared the West from annihilation, causing the Russians to abandon the island.

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