I love the first Matrix movie. It was very well stylized and produced well. That is exactly how I was expecting this game to be. Boy did I sure get a swift kick in the nuts. The gameplay is horrendously sub par…especially for a $50 game.

Also sub par is the level design. While this can probably be attributed to a truncated development cycle, nearly every area in the game has little pockets that feel “off.” There are tons of empty rooms where absolutely nothing exists, and it’s all too easy to get lost in the endless chains of rooms, many of which look alike; then, there are the cleverly placed tables and boxes and corners that just obstruct action and prevent players from using their superhuman attributes to their fullest. Why?

The biggest problem with the graphics, however, is the utterly abysmal, “we didn’t bother to take notes from any other game in all of existence,” camera system. While it does do some nice things, like pulling out to display a one-on-two fight from the side to incorporate all of the combatants, too often it gets stuck behind objects and walls, and generally struggles to keep up with the action. Add this to mouse look and you’re in for some seriously glitchy pain. Any developer will tell you that a good 3D camera is one of the trickiest things to pull off, and it wasn’t pulled off here.

You’d think the old free looking mouse would help this horrid camera and be the gunpowder that would propel our version far beyond the console ones. Quite the contrary, it actually takes all of the camera problems of those iterations and amplifies them by a factor of 100. It’s ridiculously bad. The cursor is pointless, the auto lock/auto target system is always on and always debilitating, and the whole thing feels so completely broken that nearly five year old games like Doom pretty much laugh in this piece of crap’s face.

While you’re desperately reaching out to hug the bits of joy you’re unfortunately being beaten over the head by an onslaught of bad. It’s impossible to think that in light of such mind-blowingly cool titles like Max Payne and Jedi Outcast, this game could be made, and be made so, so much worse. The action, from top to bottom, may be built on a foundation made of stylish maneuvers, cool martial arts, and slick gunplay. But when you try and jam all of that into a poorly performing beast of a game with some atrocious mechanics and an utterly agonizing camera, it just loses most of that appeal.

The fundamental flaw with this game is that it looks and feels unfinished, from the unpolished textures to the bad camera and sparse level design. The fact that the game had to ship at the same time the film was in theaters was an economic decision, and unfortunately, that compromised some of the quality. It happens all the time. But no one wants it to happen to the game based on movies they love.

As the tagline states, no matter where you are, “The Matrix Has You.” Well…it sure has me in the nightmares it has created for me.