Enter The Matrix - Reception

Reception

Despite solid sales, the game was met with mostly tepid critical reviews. On Metacritic, the game has an average mark of 62 out of 100. Two critics from Electronic Gaming Monthly gave it "bad" scores; another later admitted that his "average" score for the game was more positive than the game actually deserved. Mark MacDonald's comments were especially scathing:

"In more than 20 years of playing games, I have never seen a console game as obviously unfinished and rushed to market as Enter the Matrix. This game is a complete mess, and that's the only thing complete about it."(EGM, August. 2003)

GameSpot listed Enter the Matrix in several of their "Dubious Honors" lists at the end of 2003, including their five most disappointing titles of the year. One common complaint was that players wanted to play as trilogy protagonist Neo rather than secondary characters Ghost and Niobe, an issue Shiny Entertainment addressed with their later Matrix game Path of Neo.

Steven Poole, in his column in Edge, described Enter the Matrix as "Max Payne with celebrity scriptwriters," and said that the films' fluid fight choreography could not be matched by the game's control system, and that the game's centred view, while practical, was not as interesting as the "kinetic montage" of camera angles used in the movies' action scenes. He also expressed other concerns:

"The most worrying new precedent that Enter the Matrix sets, though, with its massively hyped synergy and narrative overlap with Reloaded, is that it seems the film itself has been deliberately made to suffer, to donate some of its lifeblood so that its vampiric brood can feed on it. In Reloaded, Niobe and her crew go to blow up the nuclear power plant, a feat of security bypassing which would presumably require something like a lobby scene squared. Instead, we see nothing until they are already in the control room. Why? Because that's what you get to do in the game instead. The film's sense of rhythm and victory over threat is compromised just so we can bash buttons on our consoles at home. It's as though James Cameron had cut footage out of Aliens so that it could be rendered in blocky 2D graphics in the 1987 Spectrum/C64 tie-in game released by Electric Dreams — which remains, actually, a superior film-to-game conversion."

Positive comments came from IGN, Game Informer, and Nintendo Power, with NP giving it 82/100, stating "its game play suffers from repetition, but this two-disc technomelange has tons of great stuff for Matrix fans." IGN's review, while mixed, praised its presentation and sound, stating that "you can't get much better than having the Wachowski Brothers filming your cutscenes," and "Kudos to the sound team for bringing the movie audio to life in the game. Excellent sound design, and a great score." The IGN review also said:

"Things could have been much better with a few more months in development. That said, the story elements and the way the Wachowski Brothers tie together the Matrix movies, the Animatrix shorts, and the game is exceptional. Not being able to slip into the black robes of the movie's principal characters is a bummer, but there's no denying that playing through Enter the Matrix will actually increase your appreciation of the Matrix universe as a whole."

They also praised the GameCube version, specifically:

"A big 'thank you' to Atari and Shiny for making sure that Nintendo's little cube didn't get shafted. The GameCube version actually ships on two disks to accommodate all the video and audio content. DPLII, progressive scan, DIVX compression — it's all used to full effect to make sure the GameCube version is as good as it can be."