As one of the three main facets of Halo 4’s Campaign mode, and a huge part of how successful the multiplayer side of things were going to be, this was a potential area for disappointment. Not only did any new weapons have to be balanced and Halo-ish, deciding which old ones to keep and which to quietly brush under the carpet must’ve been tough too. I was going to cover the vehicle selection in this post as well, but it’s standard stuff really. Apart from one new one, there’s just the basic, standard, (dependable) set in Halo 4. Mongoose. Warthog. Ghost. Banshee. Wraith.
I've played through the Campaign mode three times now, once with Jane on Normal (she doesn't like dying!), once on Heroic with Lewis, and once by myself, on Legendary, which was a slog! Those Promethean Knights sure have strong shields. This is what I thought of the Halo 4 bestiarum vocabulum. Caution: There will be spoilers! When Halo 4 was…
The Darkness. The lovely melatonin bought me this several years ago as a Secret Santa gift. I played it for a couple of hours, got bored, and stopped. Many years later I played Syndicate, a game by the same team that made The Darkness. Having loved Syndicate, I decided to revisit The Darkness to see if I was a little…
Yes it is, and it's quite good. I'm a bit annoyed that it turned up the day after it was released, but overall I am glad it is finally spinning in my Xbox. It took a while to actually play the thing - you have to install disc two if you want to play the online multiplayer portion of the…
Well, for most people. I ordered the Limited Edition from Amazon hoping to get it today, a day early, rather than tomorrow lunchtime, when the postman will most probably drop it through the letterbox. It's been so long since I've been this pumped for a game, it really has. Still, I'm playing Transformers: Fall of Cybertron to pass the time,…
So, I'm about to upgrade my OS to Windows 8 Pro. I'm never usually this eager to take up new technology, I mean, I never started using Firefox until Chrome was generally perceived as "the best". Funny, just writing out the tag for Chrome made me realise I've never mentioned Chromehounds on here before - it is one of my…
November is going to be awesome. Halo 4 and getting married? Sweet. Of the ten maps available at launch, 8 are known. One of which is familiar, the rest are new. Ragnarok - The new name for Valhalla. I'm very happy about this. Adrift - This was one of the first maps announced, it features a mech being built in…
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!
New Syndicate
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.
This game made me feel like I was living my teenage dreams. I used to be a huge Games Workshop fan, especially the Space Marine faction and Warhammer 40k in general. Hero Quest got me into it all, then Space Crusade hit and I was hooked. The Dark Angels were my favourite Chapter, and I'm looking to get their emblem…
So I bought this because one of the guys at work was raving about it. I probably should have done some research first, because about two hours in, I really regretted buying it. The controls felt sluggish, and because I picked a Sniper Rifle as my primary weapon, killing stuff was troublesome. It had that typically Japanese mechanic, you know,…
