Warning: the following will contain major spoilers for Path of Neo and the Matrix trilogy, and may affect your health.
Of all the scorn thrown at the Matrix franchise in the years since 2003, the games have had their fair share. The first, Enter the Matrix, formed part of that convoluted cross-media monolith known loosely as ‘the sequels’, stretching out the plot of the second film and filling it with what was in many places a very rough, buggy, unfinished mess. (If you ever want to know what it’d be like if the Matrix itself got wasted, play the driving levels.)
The now-defunct The Matrix Online launched in 2005, a troubled MMORPG set post-Revolutions that was supposed to be a canon continuation of the story, splitting it between Zionite, Machine and Exile factions as they failed to get along following the truce. A potentially interesting experiment in storytelling, if inevitably gamey in its structure, it met with mixed reviews, and I think soon went pretty off the rails. (I heard they killed off Morpheus and the Oracle. What!) Shafted by new management, it eventually closed down in July 2009.
The third game, and perhaps the one that received the least notice, arrived in the second half of 2005. Made by Shiny Entertainment, the same folks who made Enter the Matrix two years earlier, Path of Neo promised that this time around, rather than playing as a pair of bit-part secondary characters like we did in the last one, we’d finally get to play as the series’ protagonist, and to do all the stuff we saw him do in the movies.
And then some.
Without a doubt, Path of Neo is one of the weirdest games I’ve ever played. Often fun, often frustrating, occasionally serious, mostly crazy, conceptually and technically and visually beautiful and totally hideous, if ever I wanted to sneak a peek at a design document just to find out what the fuck, it would be for this game. In terms of its timing and position within the franchise, it’s like the hype and everything blew up, interest blinked out, and then there’s this little shack out in the middle of the wasteland where people run around with underpants on their head. (The directors, the Wachowskis, were said to have been heavily involved during development, but that just means they wore the underpants too.)
Path of Neo is a third-person shooter/brawler hybrid. It’s the same formula as Enter the Matrix, and offers exactly the same kind of fun as that game did when it managed to pull itself together, but the chaos and complexity is taken up a notch. (The graphics consequently lose roughly ten notches, but thankfully that’s not in relation to ETM.) Along with plenty of different weapons, including about 5,423 novel variations of pole, different combos have you doing all kinds of flashy martial arts moves, the best of which are treated with full-on cinematic camera work. Stealth and cover elements are introduced in designated levels, but mostly discarded after that. And like its predecessor, you get a ‘focus meter’ that allows you to briefly slow everything down to bullet time so you can do things like dodge or stop bullets, run along walls, or get a few extra kicks in.
Despite the rough graphics, this often looks very cool when you pull off a good move, which isn’t too hard. Most times, though, you hit on this kind of lazily, achieving it through button-mashing as often as on purpose. Obviously you have to have some control about you, and you have to evade and parry and whatnot, but when the game gets brawly—which is the majority of the time—it’s mostly just about staying vaguely co-ordinated and pointing your weapon in the right direction.
Oh, and most things break. All the carefully constructed environments, in the best John Woo tradition, come apart spectacularly during the action, and it can be very messy and satisfying. It makes for a really fun, chaotic, destructive brawler, even if it plays a little haphazardly. And it offers such a variety of different setpieces that it never really seems to get old.
Environments are actually pretty nice, if you have rendering detail set high enough, but the character skins are a bit iffy—especially the faces, which tend to look like immobile, swollen masks. All the higher settings achieve there is either making them really shiny or borderline glowing, with a smooth-over effect that really only exacerbates the mask effect. Plastic glow-worm surgery. Lots of rough edges and tearing, too.
The game is about as technically polished as it is pretty—which is to say, it has its moments, but sometimes a mother could not love it. Sometimes this is seriously annoying, like having to depend on extremely dumb AI to shoot at an Agent when you need her to; sometimes it’s advantageously dumb, like when an enemy shoots the gas canister they’re standing right next to. Other times it’s just plain ugly, like having those lines of Smiths pour into the tenement park along an obviously predetermined path that looks like a small child’s lazy attempt to draw a circle.
Sometimes, in a bizarre accidental way, it actually feeds into the whole crazy Matrix concept quite well. One of the best levels, which has you blasting through a building replete with moulding plaster walls and an inordinate number of the aforementioned gas canisters, has a tendency to throw corpses around with such enthusiasm that it’s not uncommon to find a trembling torso or a pair of legs stuck dangling from the wallpaper.
'They're in the walls!'
One of the aspects of the game I remember being publicised quite a bit was the ability to pick your own path in a way that differentiated from the movies. But apart from the possibility of actually escaping the office at the start, what this amounted to in reality was a few different martial arts upgrade options and the occasional cluster of levels that you could do in any order. Or you could beat the game really fast by picking the blue pill at the start.
Other than that, there are plenty of aspects that played out differently from the films, though mandatory in the context of the game. While you do still get to faithfully re-enact all the major in-Matrix action scenes that Neo was involved in—the tenement park brawl, the chateau, lobby scene (twice)—what the game does with the films’ narrative is pretty bizarre.
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Dan O'Connor says:
I loved this game, I must have played through it about 8 times. I always found the ending infuriating though, I thought it was so crap, I’d much rather have just had a final showdown with Smith. The train level and the levels fighting the ants were infuriating as well.