Enter the Matrix review (PlayStation 2)

The game doesn't deliver much story, forcing you to fill in the blanks with things you remember from the new movie, The Matrix Reloaded.

The game does have a neat little element to it known as hacking. When you select hacking from the main menu, you're thrown into a DOS-like command line interface, given a few simple commands, and let loose. As you hack around and discover different commands, you'll be able to watch the game's FMV and look up information on the characters, cars, and weapons found in the game. Cheaters will also be able to enter cheat codes here, as well as drop extra weapons into the game's levels. It's a neat touch that gives the game a little more style, but within an hour or two, you'll have seen everything the hacking mode has to offer. More control over the main game from here would have been really cool.

Enter the Matrix bears the additional weight of being a pretty buggy game. Aside from the aforementioned AI bugs that permeate every version of the game, each version has its own quirks. The PC version has a highly unstable frame rate, even on systems that exceed the system requirements by a wide margin. The PlayStation 2 version suffers from serious frame rate problems and a bevy of audio errors, the most troublesome of which causes some cutscenes' audio to be played twice at slightly different times, creating an echo effect that renders almost all the dialogue completely unintelligible. The Xbox version has locked up on us a few times, and the GameCube release has its own frame rate troubles. You would think that, since Shiny has been working on a Matrix game for years, the end product would come out polished and, well, shiny. Add to this plenty of sloppy instances where dead guards clip through walls and the game's generally weak animation, and the whole thing ends up looking like a rush job.

To further discuss the differences between the various platforms, it's worth mentioning that the PC version of the game has a drastically different control scheme than the console versions, defaulting to keyboard-and-mouse control. While that's fine for the shooting elements of the game, it's a bit too loose to really work in hand-to-hand situations. The PlayStation 2 controller is the best way to play the game, as it simply has the best button layout. The Xbox version maps your firing control to the black button, which is way, way out of place on the now-standard S controller. An old-style Xbox controller works a bit better. The GameCube version doesn't control especially well, either, using the Z button for opening doors and disarming foes while using one button for a universal strafe command. You have some options as far as adjusting the control scheme goes on every platform, but in the end, the PS2 version is more precise than the rest.

The game doesn't deliver much story, forcing you to fill in the blanks with things you remember from the new movie, The Matrix Reloaded.

Of course, that's not to say the PlayStation 2 version is the overall best. Graphically, it's the weakest, delivering more pixelated models and more frame rate trouble than the other console versions. The GameCube version looks a bit better, but the Xbox version, with its 1080i support for high-definition televisions, is the best-looking console version of the game. The PC version has the potential to look better, but the awful frame rate on PCs that meet the system requirements really gets in the way.

Enter the Matrix is a game that, done right, could have been something special. Never before have games and movies tried to come together in this way, and the concept is a cool one. However, the game serves as little more than an advertisement for the film--it doesn't have a story that stands on its own, and the gameplay doesn't really offer anything that we haven't seen in better games. If you're a huge fan of the film, it's worth renting to see the few additional sequences, but for the rest of you, it's just another licensed game that doesn't do justice to its source material.