Stephen wrote a review of Enter the Matrix, but I'm not going to let that stop me from writing my own. Because don't tell him, but I think I'm funnier. It'd break his heart.
I didn't go into Enter the Matrix with high expectations, primarily because I'd seen Matrix Reloaded and the Animatrix and had figured out long ago that the Brothers Wachowski are just toying with us to get as much of our money as possible. I don't exactly condone a storyline that involves you having to spread your interest across several different platforms of media, while spending a lot of money in the process. Ask me about the .hack franchise sometime, really. So, expectations were low, but damn it all, the bastards hooked me in, so now I have to play to see what the hell those big gaps in the movie were about.
The first place the game falls down is in terms of that plot. It begins with something vaguely connected to the rest of the story... that is, if you've seen Flight of the Osiris in the Animatrix. If not, you're simply running around the world's largest post office and occasionally doing slow motion flips into postal workers, which, while it is something we've all dreamed long of doing, doesn't make good plot. The plotline is possible more vague and unfocused than the Matrix films, which, as you well know, says a lot. The game descends into fetch quests, such as rescuing some character you (the player) have no emotional or plot-based connection to. Admittedly, I have not played the entire game, but the first act of anything should be where we're grabbed into a plotline, and Enter the Matrix failed this spectacularly.
The live-action cut scenes were, as Stephen said, very impressive, although the skeptic in me wonders if they were cutting room floor footage, or shot in a day, or some such. The in-game cut scenes, however, left a lot to be desired. For all the alleged money and work that went into this, Happy Polygon Rendered Jada Pinkett-Smith should not seem to have Metal Gear Solid 1-esque mitten hands at points. But I'm sure that's just supposed to be a glitch in the Matrix. In addition to this, the switching between live-action and game-engine cut scenes sometimes seemed a little jarring; for a while it seemed they would have the cut scenes that were in the "real world" in live action and all others in CG, but then I suppose they wouldn't get to dress up real people in silly leather snakeskin coats and do their hair all wacky.
(An aside: Why do all the Matrix people dress like that? Don't they realize it makes them look conspicuous? Don't the realize it makes the fight scenes look like dance numbers? And while we're at it, where did the people in Zion get dyes to make fabric? Or fabric at all? But all of these questions are for another article, another day.)
And then we get to the gameplay. Sure, running around really fast (that Happy Polygon Rendered Jada Pinkett-Smith can seriously run like crazy), doing zany slow-motion Matrix fight moves, running along walls, and dodging bullets is fun... but only for about thirty minutes. Then it gets repetitive and boring... much like the fight scenes in Reloaded! But I digress. The gameplay seemed to consist entirely of "run to this place, watch cut scene, complete fetch quest, watch cut scene, fight people all crazy, watch cut scene, watch cut scene, watch cut scene."
There was a point in the game where I made Happy Polygon Rendered Jada Pinkett-Smith jump off a balcony in slow motion, guns blazing at the armed guards below, and before I could land and unleash hell upon them, the game... loaded a cut scene. I felt deeply cheated.
On top of this, the game is as filled with bugs as a ninja who uses bugs to kill people, and the load times are absolutely ridiculous. A thirty second load time is just not acceptable. My feelings on this game can best be summed up with one title that sat across the bottom of the screen for far too long as I waited for a level to load:
Loading The Bowels.
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