As with many shooting games, the vibe of Singularity owes a debt of gratitude to the movie Aliens.
In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver travels to a foreign land to engage in a hallway-by-hallway battle against yucky aliens.
In Singularity, you portray a U.S. soldier who travels to a strange Russian island, where you engage in a hallway-by-hallway battle against yucky zombies (and well-dressed Soviet soldiers).
What's more, you listen to another soldier tell you things like, "Stay frosty," which is literally a line from the movie Aliens.
Why are you doing all this? In the 1950s, the Soviets developed amazing resources on a bizarre island to create a weapon that manipulates time.
This time weapon is odd. When you shoot things with it, those things turn younger or older. So, if you fire your time weapon at zombies, this will age them immediately, and they will turn into bone and dust in front of your eyes.
Other times, you must shoot decrepit, crumbling stairwells with this time weapon, making the stairwells reverse-age until they look new once more, so you can cross them.
This time weapon is a unique device in games. I wish I had one to reverse the ravages of an entire relationship.
Sometimes, you travel through a rip in the fabric of time, sending you back to the 1950s on this island. That means, one moment, you're in the present day, shooting zombies and blobs. The next moment, you're back in the Fifties, shooting Soviet soldiers. The game seesaws between both of those eras.
My one real complaint: Singularity's increasing difficulty doesn't come with a good explanation. At the beginning, one shotgun blast blows off a human rival's arms. Later, I had to shoot a human soldier five times in the face with a shotgun in order to kill him. What gives?
A secondary complaint: During the whole game, you must look for ammo, first-aid kits and other necessary items lying on the ground or on Soviet desks. In other words, while you're constantly walking around this island, trying to survive, you're also staring at every nook and cranny of every gray office space to see if you can spot a box of bullets. That dulls things up a bit.
But Singularity does succeed as an above-average horror game, with genuinely startling ghosts and sound effects that made me jump a little and feel sudden tingles of anxiety.