![]() The point of difference is that in Syndicate, the choices are always pointing to direct action, which in turn makes the game feel flat and one-note in its construction. Both feature black-clad bionic agents operating in a cyberpunk future ruled by corporate skullduggery, and both define your journey by the upgrades you choose. You need to use your abilities intelligently, but the game itself is never varied enough to warrant any deeper strategy.Īs well as its own cult history, Syndicate is a game standing in the shadow of last year's Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Try playing Syndicate as a vanilla run-and-gun shooter and you'll get creamed. Each ability can only be used once its gauge is full, and this can only be filled by performing feats such as headshots and perfect "breach spikes", releasing the left bumper in a sweet spot during a breach.Īll the abilities are fun to use and absolutely vital to your survival. Finally, Persuade - a nod to the Persuadertron of old - lets you brainwash an enemy into fighting on your side for a brief time before shooting themselves. Suicide causes an enemy to explode, causing radial damage to anyone nearby. Effects range from the old standby of hacking doors and servers to manipulating the behaviour of chipped enemies - and, as you progress through the story, you gradually earn three "apps" which can be used to wreak havoc on opposing forces.īackfire causes weapons to, well, backfire, staggering the wielder and making them vulnerable to attack. ![]() More interesting is the way your chip allows you to remotely "breach" various technologies that you encounter by holding down the left bumper. Useful, certainly, but nothing we haven't seen explored in plenty of previous shooters. A tap on the right bumper activates DART mode for a limited period, during which time moves more slowly, enemies are highlighted, shots hit harder and you become more resilient. Syndicate's point of difference comes from its cyberpunk setting and the fact you have a DART-6 computer chip in your head. #Tyrian 2000 left stuck how toStarbreeze knows how to deliver this stuff, and it does it with style. Gunplay is satisfyingly beefy, the enemy AI just smart enough to be reasonably challenging and the environments designed for both civilian form and violent function, channelling the action in enjoyable directions. Those, not coincidentally, are the sort of mission objectives you receive at the start as you go about your business as a good little drone.Īnd business is good, at least where action is concerned. ![]() These massive global businesses conduct what appears to be open warfare against each other, kidnapping scientists to get access to the latest cybernetic upgrades, sabotaging rival installations and assassinating key personnel. You're playing as Kilo, a biochip-enhanced agent for the Eurocorp syndicate in a dystopian future where corporate influence has long since overruled outdated notions of nationality. The story mode is by far the weakest part of the package, sharing precious little with its vintage ancestor and relying on both narrative and gameplay clichés that fail to inspire. As it is, it's dependable enough, but hardly interesting. Had the two been combined with the flair that Starbreeze has exhibited in the past, Syndicate could have been quite special. It's a decision that leaves the former feeling predictable and perfunctory and the latter (a co-op campaign) frustratingly underdeveloped. ![]() Part of the problem is that, in accordance with accepted FPS thinking, the game has been cleaved down the middle and separated into single- and multiplayer chunks. With such ambitious exercises as Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness to its credit, Swedish studio Starbreeze would seem to be the perfect choice to inject some mutant DNA into the genre, but Syndicate is sadly the developer's most anonymous and generic work thus far. But Syndicate is also a game hemmed in by the standards of the FPS genre, which are themselves showing considerable strain after years of overuse. At times you can feel the game creaking as it tries to keep one foot in a world created almost 20 years ago and the other in the modern shooter space. For a game set in the future, EA's rebooted Syndicate is a game very much trapped by the past.Īt an instinctive level, that's because it's an all-action first-person shooter reboot of a 1993 game that was all about top-down strategy. ![]()
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