If I could turn back time...

What would you do if you could turn back time? Stop Hitler? Tell somehow how you really feel? Put slightly less water in the bath? We all have things we would have done differently given half the chance. Singularity is the story of one man's attempt to save the future by changing the past - on a secret Russian military research island full of mutants and evil helicopters.

This may be the least pretentious first-person shooter of 2010. Mad scientists have mucked up the world and you need to sort it out with a mixture of high-velocity projectiles, explosives and time-travelling crates. You're never more than a grenade damage indicator away from something to shoot in the face and your means of doing so are always expanding in fun ways.

You're an American soldier in the present day sent to investigate strange readings on a seemingly abandoned military base off the coast of Russia. Katorga 12, it turns out, was home to a radical research project in the 1950s that tapped into a rare element called E99, which the Soviet Union hoped to use to win the Cold War.

Obviously things went wrong though because the whole place is in a rotten state of repair and there are skeletons strewn everywhere. Like BioShock, you begin the game piecing together a sense of what happened, and then spend the next 10 hours shooting your way through to some kind of resolution and escape.

"The least pretentious first-person shooter of 2010."

Dr. Strange Glove

Unfortunately, the island is host to a lot of temporal anomalies that send you hurtling back to the 1950s, and in one instance you accidentally save a man who then goes on to become the fascist leader of the world in an alternate future. Having done that, you team up with a friendly mad scientist named Barisov in the hope of correcting your mistake and putting the wider world back in order.

While you scavenge for shotguns and sniper rifles, which can be upgraded at intervals, Barisov soon outfits you with the TMD glove and wrist attachment. TMD stands for Time Manipulation Device, and inevitably it can be used to move objects through time and freeze little pockets of time to stop fan blades spinning or doors closing, but it can also pick up and throw things in the same manner as Half-Life 2's gravity gun.

While the TMD forms the basis of a lot of puzzle solutions (usually involving moving a crate and changing its age so it's smaller and rustier or larger and shinier), it's lots of fun in combat too, allowing you to turn a soldier into a skeleton or fire out a burst of energy that sends enemies reeling.

Your regular arsenal gets more interesting too. The best gun is a rifle that you pick up occasionally which fires bullets that you can pilot through the air in slow motion, allowing you to blast people's legs off or - yes - shoot them in the face.

"Singularity is non-stop fun... and it looks fantastic too."

Not Half

The island is rife with Russian soldiers who work for Barisov's nemesis Demichev, but you also run into lots of mutants, zombies and even weird dragon things who shoot rockets. It's a broad and dangerous although not massively exciting line-up, probably the best of which is a huge crab spider demon who stalks you through a sewer.

There aren't really many new ideas in Singularity, but you won't really mind: it's non-stop fun, with something new and entertaining to do every few minutes, and it looks fantastic too, like a combination of BioShock and Half-Life 2. The fact it derives so much from both games isn't a problem because everything it borrows it does so lovingly and effectively.

The single-player mode lasts around 10 hours, and there's a bit of extra interest to be had from multiplayer, which features a Soldiers vs. Creatures mode where one team uses TMDs and the other plays as the monsters.

Singularity may be about changing the world, but the game itself doesn't. What it does do though is keep you entertained throughout with a range of great ideas purloined from the best games in the business and spread evenly over its runtime. While a lot of shooters try to get inside people's heads, Singularity focuses on having fun shooting at them.

Boom
+ Fantastic weapons.
+ Looks beautiful.
+ Unpredictable and exciting.

Bust
- Mostly old ideas.
- Dull enemies.
- Nonsensical story.