Ah, Syndicate. This is based on an old Amiga game, you know. I used to love it, I think, my memory is hazy – but I do remember I was absolutely awful at it. I loved going in, all guns blazing, then running out of ammo or failing missions for accidentally killing civilians. Syndicate had one of the most original weapons ever: The Persuadatron. You just run around with it, and it convinces people to follow you around. I vaguely remember using it to gather up twenty or so meat-shields then rushing into enemy territory and getting bummed. I was way too impatient and impetuous in my younger days to be playing strategy games. Despite growing as a person and becoming quite calm and calculating, I still don’t really like strategy games. So, it’s pretty good that this re-booted re-make is re-imagined as a first person shooter then!
I’ll tackle the story first, while it’s still fresh in my mind. It was awful. Just coming off of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I may be judging it a tad too harshly when I say that as far as comparisons go, Deus Ex is highbrow literature whereas Syndicate is Saturday morning cartoon adaptation. I’m not a fan of disrespecting creative endeavours that people have quite obviously poured their heart and soul into, but the story lacked emotion, I never felt the motivation behind any of the characters actions, and it was over far too quickly. If you want to make me care about a character, let me spend some time getting to know them. The campaign being so short contributed to the abrupt nature of the story, but I’ll write about that a bit later.
This is a spoiler, by the way, but at one point your avatar is holding the lead female character down, with a gun pointed at her head, and you are prompted to pull the trigger. I didn’t hesitate because I cared for the character, or because I thought that shooting a not-real lady with an imaginary gun was wrong, but because I was intrigued as to how the developers would deal with the repercussions. If I shot this lady in the face, would I be taking a different path through the game? Or is she only important up to this point? Do I really have a choice? As it turns out, if you don’t pull the trigger, you momentarily malfunction and she is able to walk away while telling you that she designed your chip and had programmed a few safeguards in there, and if you do pull the trigger, you momentarily malfunction and she is able to walk away while telling you that she designed your chip and had programmed a few safeguards in there.
There’s a massive incongruity in Syndicate. The main Campaign mode is utterly beautiful and insanely polished, but is incredibly short and feels more like a tutorial for the co-operative experience. Don’t get me wrong, it’s full of nice touches and subtle nods to the original game, such as the level that has you being pursued through a nightclub (while foundation trembling beats are pumped through the sound system) and getting your hands on the iconic and incredibly powerful minigun – but it’s all over too quickly. In contrast to this, the Co-op mode looks a bit ropey in places and has an awfully unintuitive UI, but will probably play host to 90% of my total Syndicate play-time. I can’t help but feel that if the developers had spent a little less time on single-player, and focused on the multiplayer, we’d be onto a real winner. It’s not as if the Campaign is free from problems, either. The pacing is awful (you just about get all your abilities, then wham, you’re packed off to an area where 66% of them don’t work), the signposting is terrible, and you very rarely feel like a super soldier cyborg.
The key element of the original was always the four Agents, they were spot on to recognise this for the reboot. Being in a team of four human players and performing hostile takeovers is an absolute joy. The more powerful enemies were really designed to be taken on in this mode; one player flanking around behind to disable his impenetrable armour while the others draw the fire and wait patiently for the tide to turn. And taking on a CPU controlled team of four enemy Agents requires an incredible team effort, the satisfaction of ripping their neural chips out after a very heated battle is immense. There are numerous genuinely different “applications” for players to choose from, each lending themselves to distinct play-styles. Straight up offensive players pick damage modifiers and damage over time attacks, whereas defensive players can choose to raise shields around their team-mates, let off EMP devices to disorient enemies or make enemy weapons backfire. Players who would rather support their team can choose to heal their team-mates all at once, breach enemy defences in the blink of an eye, or recharge all the squad’s applications.
Gunplay is spot on. I’ve gradually come around to the idea of holding one trigger to look down the sights of a gun whilst pulling the other to shoot, and it’s probably helped my accuracy in shooters quite a lot. Every gun truly feels different, even the usually samey machine guns. One machine gun is your bog-standard, one has target tracking and the other has an added grenade launcher, and they even sound different when firing. The Kusanagi is probably my favourite weapon – it’s a sniper rifle with an alternate firing mode that makes it like a burst rifle – perfect for long distance head-shots as well as when you panic after being ambushed at close quarters. We have a stereo hooked up to the television in our room, and ideally I like to play games with the bass up loud – Syndicate sure does do the set-up justice, more than any other gun-related game I’ve played recently. Bullets whistle furiously out of the gun-barrels, and rip through flesh with a suitably wet squelch. The middle of a skirmish sounds like a busy building site, albeit one where they use high-powered machine guns instead of drills.
Anyway, the main problem with co-op is getting your head around the bizarre lobby system. To be fair, I see what they have tried to do – put everything a mere shoulder button tap or two away – but it’s just so cluttered and initially confusing. Another element of it that is not at all clear is the upgrade system. To upgrade weapons or applications, you have to use two distinctly different sets of chips to unlock blueprints, then choose to research the blueprints, which are then fuelled by any EXP you earn while playing cooperatively. One type of chip is unlocked by completing missions, the other by jabbing a screwdriver in powerful enemies heads, I forget which is which. I think eventually I may just understand it, but I was initially very put off by the menu. I would’ve liked more customisation options for the Agents to really make me feel attached to the character I’m controlling. Such options would be more than welcome in a sequel, if in fact there ever is one.
Oh, spoilers, I totally saw Eurocorp (your Syndicate) ending up as the baddies and Agent Merit (your partner) being the final boss a mile off.
