STORY When the Hovercraft Osiris discovered a large mass of machienes digging into the ground the Captain Thadeus sent a drop package containing evidence of this into the matrix shortly before they were killed. This is where you come in. The mission of the crew of the Logos is to firstly find this package, the story is then woven into the plotline that is Reloaded, filling in a few gaps here are there. Like the movie's plot it is confusing and while you understand what's happening, the reason for why it's happening does not make much sense.

GRAPHICS A very mixed bag... The characters are very well done, the LOOK like their live action counterparts and are pretty reconisable. The textures for the characters tho are another story. Ranging from pretty damn good, to very poor in quality belonging to a game 6 years ago it's a very mixed bag. The game engine is interesting. On it sits different modules for different parts of the games, like driving, fighting, flying and so on. The engine is pretty powerful when you have a good hard look at it, the animations are very well done and blend in pretty flawlessly. It's a shame that in some aspects - like when they exit via a phone they don't go all sparky and fade away. Bullet time is...well interesting. Instead of the nice clean ripples you get in the movies, you end up with weird stretched out ripples that don't look too brilliant, but the move between bullet time and so on is very well done with all animations playing well in slow-mo. Other graphical features of this engine are reflective objects - like sunglasses and apparrently bullets. Explosions and fire are far from spectacular, and smoke is usually large transparent white dots.

SOUND None of the guns sound realistic - then again it IS The Matrix and none of the guns there sounded too realistic either. The sound is pretty average, walking on steel sheeting placed across a gap sounds just like the concrete you step off onto on the other side. What was really missing was the clinks of shells, and ammo clips, and all the other small details that games like Max Payne were able to use. The music was pretty much very ambient, didn't really do much, the only rare cases was when the music was taken from the movie (the fight in the tea house level) and a bit in the FMVs - but really there was not much to it.

GAMEPLAY Ok - here we go... Two words - Console Port It plays like it would play on a console, VERY limited keys, button mashing, combos galore, horribly linear - yet - somewhat entertaining....somewhat

Most of the game consists of you following directions from Sparks - your operator or an arrow on the top of the screen - it's very hard to get lost and if you do...well....that's just luck. Fortuantly there's some viarity in all this - Ghost and Niobe have their own different tasks in some missions, and in a few cases work as teams. The game also features a beat the boss kind of mission, with Niobe being up against them more than Ghost. There also features a few driving missions and when you're riding shotgun - Niobe's driving is very scary. Combat is irritating, firstly you cannot aim freely, save being in first person mode and that's another headache all together. You auto aim onto things, and that's...a bit weird to the point of having bullets fly out of your gun at 45 degree angles from what the barrel was facing, You're also woefully inaccurate to the point where shooting at a door from point blank you're bound to miss.

Fighting is fun....and repetative. I ended up thinking "12 weeks in a MoCap studio for this" There's sadly little difference between Ghost and Niobe - which is a shame. With Ghost being more the peace loving monk of the two you'd expect a different form of martial arts from him - no while a kick or two is different, some of the more elaborate moves - like jumping through glass firing both weapons while spinning in the air is the same for both of the characters. Fortuantly some of the other major charactres - Seraph, Agents and Trinity have their own reconisable moves and styles that were from the movie. There are quite a few moves that each characters can preform - tho I don't think it's the 1200 moves per character the marketing fluff advertises. But all the cool moves are there, from disarming your foe by grabbing his gun and wacking it into his face, to running off a wall and doing a kick into the guy's face, to wall running and limited bullet doding.

The other aspect of gameplay - is hacking. This is a small..uhh game...that requires you to "hack the matrix" using a semi-dos prompt style interface. This does little to lengthen actuall gameplay. Upon finishing it you are rewarded with the ability to view images, FMV's and profiles that have text that is too big to properly fit inside their boxes. There's also a few useless options like - Vibrate.exe - which makes your controler vibrate - hardly handy when you have a PC. Other things - like Multiplayer do not work as well.

FMVs Well it seems that FMV's live - though they are rarely seen with today's games, and when they are, they're usually poorly acted, CGI sets, campy lines...but this game's FMV's are a bit different.

Firstly the claim "featureing the main cast" is a bit of a lie. The only main member from the main cast who does do extra stuff for the movie is Carrie-Ann Moss - Trinity. She appears fleetingly in a scene where you fight against her as Ghost. The other major cast members do not show up - with the teeny exception of Morpheus when he appears in the bit where he falls onto Niobe's car. All of the other cast are the secondary cast who are glimpsed in the film - but are given a slightly "larger" role. Plot holes are also answered here a bit - you work out what the plan was with the ships against the machines and why that failed and you get to see the new Oracle who raises more questions that answers. These are all professionally shot, and well acted - a pity they could not have done the in-game cut-scenes like this. There are a few scenes that were shot enterily in-game.

The Bad

Looking at all this you have to ask - what's lacking? You have a plot written by the guys who wrote the original film, you have passable graphics and sound, brilliant character details and animations and a game that is pure action....what's missing?

The answer is polish. Firstly the game was made so that EVERYONE could play it, X-box, PC, PS2 and GameCube...that's a lot of platforms for one game, the problem is - working out an engine that will happily work for all of these platforms. That's one reason The other one is - marketing, this game would have been fine if it was released a month ahead from the movie's release. they might have even worked out a few bugs. But no - a tight schedule meant the game could hardly get up to the game that it was meant to be. Some of the bugs I occured were, game crashing, sound missing or heavily distorted, large parts of the level missing, items that could not be picked up and were mission specific and other random graphical glitches. Yes it's bug ridden - and how so...

The Bottom Line

Hire it out - don't bother spending money on this - while the game is hardly a winner it is not a loser... If you're a Matrix affectionado - like me - then you will prolly enjoy this game, if not - put it back on the shelf and buy something like BloodRayne that also features bullet time - plus the fun ability to sever people with long blades.\

In short this game hit the bottom of the rabbit hole too fast, broke it's legs, and can't get up again.