The general consensus among gamers and Matrix fans alike is that Enter the Matrix (the first game based on the Matrix films) and the film sequels mostly sucked. Granted they certainly didn't live up to the hype, but what ever does? Personally, I enjoyed some of Enter the Matrix and thought movies were great, but I too joined the crap wagon around about the infamous 'rave scene' in Reloaded. One of the biggest criticisms about Enter the Matrix was that players only got to control two ancillary characters that no one really cared about. What gamers actually wanted was to be 'The One'.

The Matrix: Path of Neo attempts to rectify the fatal shortcoming of the first Matrix game by giving players full control over 'The One' aka Neo. If you have no knowledge of the Matrix storyline or have never seen any of the Matrix films, I have full confidence that you will have absolutely no idea what is going on during this game. The story of the films is difficult to follow at best and Path of Neo doesn't do it any favours in the coherence department.

The game begins with Neo choosing to take the red or blue pill to either enlightenment or continued ignorance and assuming you chose enlightenment the game quickly moves on to the escape from Neo's workplace scene. It is important to point out that none of the scenes from the films play out exactly how they did on screen and most have often laborious 'filler' added to turn short action sequences from the film to decent length game levels. The first level in particular does not exactly grip the player by the seat of their pants. It is instead the first of a series of repetitive tutorial levels that leave the player thinking 'Yep, good thing that twenty minutes wasn't in the film.' over and over again.

Live action footage from the films is interspersed between levels but is re-edited into a confusing mix-match of various sentences, characters and scenes! Without any prior knowledge of the context of these seemingly random snippets the player would be completely at a loss to follow the story. When not filling out a well known scene with repeating set-pieces the game presents players with a completely new scene that supposably occurred whilst Neo was off-screen in the films. Some of these levels result in odd tonal changes to the game and range from fun and interesting to confusing and down right laughable.

As far as capturing the 'feeling' of the Matrix films, Path of Neo is a mixed bag. The most obvious omissions are the voices of the original cast. Laurence Fishburne is the only original cast member to lend his voice for his character and the occasional narration, with the remainder all voiced by just passable 'sound-alikes'. Secondly, the music soundtrack is missing almost all of the memorable tracks that have become as synonymous to the films as Bullet Time. The famous 'lobby scene' and the first 'army of Agent Smiths' scene are just not the same without their signature music pumping through your speakers. The lacklustre unlicensed voices and music destroy the game's chances of ever completely nailing the Matrix feel.

That may sound like a lot of negatives (and there are more to come) but Path of Neo is not all bad. At its heart, the game is a brawler and a very good one at that. The hand-to-hand and melee fighting system is first rate with effortlessly executed combos that will surprise players with new moves and animations right to the very end. Button mashers can even survive as key press hints are displayed on the screen so that anyone can at least perform the games simplest combos but the depth is there to satisfy the fighting game elite. The total number of different moves and combos is quite staggering with Neo's abilities evolving over time.

Players have an opportunity to choose some of the moves Neo learns between levels, but imposed choice restrictions mean his overall progression from Hacker to Superman is not as open-ended as it first appears. All of Neo's moves are executed with simple button presses, Thumbstick twists and trigger pulls, but are context sensitive so that combat with multiple enemies turns out very differently than one-on-one fights. In fact fighting large groups of enemies is quite easy and very cool looking once you get the hang of it. The melee fighting possible in this game is exactly what fans have wanted to do ever since seeing The Matrix for the first time. At least they got that right this time.

Firearms on the other hand are a completely different story. The aiming forces players to switch between targets by a flick of the Right Thumbstick. Unfortunately, the Right Thumbstick is used for camera control at all times except when targeting enemies so it's not unusual for you to be struggling with the at times crazy camera, unintentionally targeting the wrong enemies in the process. Not only that but as clicking the Right Thumbstick draws and holsters ranged weapons it is very easy to accidentally put your guns away mid-gunfight. Last but not least, it is very common for the game to lock-on to enemies either through walls or even dead bodies and not allowing the player to switch their aim. The only way to rectify this seemed to be to quickly disarm and rearm yourself.

Graphically the game is both broken and brilliant. The character models are some of the ugliest low-res mutants I have ever seen and generally only look vaguely like their Hollywood counterparts. No wonder celebrities get plastic surgery if this is their impression of what we think they look like! But it is not just the models that are terrible as the game is riddled with graphical bugs (maybe they are just glitches in the Matrix?). Textures turn on and off, strange clipping occurs and at times the results are hilarious. In one in-game cut scene a helicopter landed on a roof but the pilot (if full siting position floating a good distance under the aircraft itself) landed and then passed through the roof. In another player-controlled moment, Neo performed a spectacular disarm move against a hapless SWAT member to then kill him with his own sub-machinegun, but whilst holding it backwards!

On the other hand, some of the graphical effects look quite impressive and the amount of destructible architecture and particles on screen is often mind-blowing. It would appear that these effects are also Xbox-blowing, as the game frequently grinds to an unplayable slow frame-rate especially in areas of smoke or fog. I would have loved to see what Path of Neo would have looked like on the Xbox 360 as it appears to be a little too ambitious for the current aging Xbox and PS2. That said the game does have quite a lot of 'wow moments' and looks and plays the best when bullet-time is activated which is a lot more useful this time around. The Havok Physics system is utilised to great effect to create some great death animations especially when involving explosions in slow motion, sadly, it isn't enough to save the game.