Instead, you'll find yourself relying on your martial arts "skills," except in rare circumstances where firearms are required. All you need to do to win is to jump around like a madman, mashing buttons.Īlthough you have an arsenal of weapons at your disposal throughout the game, the awkward and inaccurate control scheme makes it impossible to use them effectively. Path of Neo addresses the main complaint about the first game - you couldn't play as Neo - but bugs, bad decisions, and schizophrenic cutscenes leave this game in worse shape than its predecessor.Īs you progress through Path of Neo you'll unlock new abilities and fighting styles for Neo to use however, the game's simplistic, button-mashing fighting engine doesn't require you to use the new skills at all. Remember Enter the Matrix? Shiny's last game, timed to coincide with the launch of the last two Matrix movies, was seriously flawed, but still included moments of fun. It doesn't help that interest in the Matrix franchise has waned following the disappointing climax to the trilogy. An overly simple combat engine combined with clunky controls, a clumsy camera, and marginal graphics bog down the idea of playing "god" in the virtual matrix. The Matrix: Path of Neo never manages to accomplish that feat.
#THE MATRIX PATH OF NEO LICENSE#
While the game wasn't great, it did manage to take the Matrix license beyond the screen and compliment the franchise. I really enjoyed Enter the Matrix when it came out alongside Matrix: Reloaded in 2003. What good is it to be god if you can't control what you are going to do? Perhaps the whole package would have been a better fit in 2003 when the franchise still felt relevant. It almost detaches the player from the action as everything is reduced to simple button mashing. I really don't think that the best way to accomplish that sense of omnipotence was to simplify the control scheme down to two action buttons. I read somewhere that the idea behind Path of Neo was that game players' biggest disappointment with Enter the Matrix was that they didn't get the chance to play as Neo with his god-like powers. Unfortunately, for every gleeful moment there are two that make you cringe as the camera pops inside Neo's head during certain attacks (causing you to see the inside textures) and even the hair textures on some of the models don't line up with the associated head. Each focus attack manages to convey a sense of brutality that you can't help but giggle at.
One shining moment for Path of Neo is in the action animations. In fact, the controls become so cumbersome that certain segments of the game actually feel like a chore to complete. While this control scheme may have worked on a console gamepad at moments, it doesn't translate well to the mouse/keyboard combo on a PC. However cool this may sound, a combat engine that is essentially broken down to two attack buttons keeps the action from really excelling. Simple RPG-esque elements guide Neo's development of skills through the game as he progresses towards the status of god. The Matrix: Path of Neo takes players through the trilogy of Matrix films and a little bit beyond, giving them complete control of Neo all the way back to the beginning of the story. From there, the game has to fight an uphill battle.
#THE MATRIX PATH OF NEO MOVIE#
Is it really necessary to revisit a film franchise that has gone by the wayside since the last film was released more than two years ago? The whole idea behind The Matrix: Path of Neo is that the answer to that question is, "yes." Essentially a movie trilogy companion game, Path of Neo starts off in a rough spot, trying to find relevance in a pop-culture that has essentially put the franchise on the back burner already. Path of Neo was created by veteran design studio Shiny Entertainment, which also developed 2003's Enter the Matrix.
#THE MATRIX PATH OF NEO SERIES#
As the subtitle suggests, this single-player action-adventure allows gamers to take the role of Neo himself, and to follow his path through all the films in the sci-fi series (including material from the Animatrix shorts), making use of extraordinary abilities such as gravity-defying leaps, martial-arts mastery, and control over the flow of time itself. Matrix fans jack back into the computer-generated façade we know as reality, and for the first time, take the role of The One who is destined to save us all from its soul-siphoning illusions.
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