Syndicate Review (360)

Topple rival corporations as a digitally enhanced super-soldier. Hold on… Doesn’t that sound a bit like…

If there’s one thing that the videogame world will never grow tired of, it’s the sci-fi fps genre, and while the market never seems to be massively saturated with them, there has been a steady stream of these games for as long as I can remember. Obviously with this being the case, the genre has had many hits, as well as a fair number of misses. Just off the top of my head, last year saw the release of Dead Space 2, Killzone 3, Crysis 2, Brink, Duke Nukem: (took) Forever, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Resistance 3, Gears of War 3, Rage, and Halo: Anniversary, and as I said, that’s just off the top of my head. Syndicate is one of the first sci-fi fps games of 2012, and is allegedly a re-booting of a series of real-time tactical games released in the early to mid 90’s, although it resembles another more recent game far more closely, but I’ve promised that I won’t dwell on that too much.

At its core, Syndicate is a half-decent shooting game

The game begins with an exposition informing you that in the not too distant future, several businesses band together to form ‘EuroCorp’ – a powerful technological development syndicate which proceeds to develop and implement powerful brain-enhancement chips which link their users into a worldwide ‘dataverse’, rendering any digital and networking devices obsolete. The 43% of the population who are not chipped are considered outcasts and banished to lower levels of the cities where they are effectively forgotten about. Due to large scale corporate espionage and rivalries between syndicates, elite ‘agents’ are created, to protect the company’s assets and interests. You step into the shoes of one such agent – ‘Miles Kilo’, and throughout the game are tasked with various missions, which generally involve shooting a lot of people and destroying a lot of stuff on behalf of your corporate overlords As you have already probably guessed, this is not the most original story, but it does serve to establish a world, and justify the action that follows taking place. Like many games of this type, the story in Syndicate does feel a little weak, and seems like a secondary feature to the action, but saying this, we have been spoiled in recent years to many first person shooter games that do also possess captivating stories. Still, a little more character establishment and development wouldn’t have gone a miss here. Development was handled by Starbreeze Studios, who have a fairly good track record, having garnered critical acclaim for ‘The Darkness’ and the ‘Chronicles of Riddick’ games. As such, the game mostly plays well – the shooting is solid, and the ‘Dart 6’ chip features (which I constantly struggled not to call augmentations) provide some interesting gameplay mechanics. Sadly though, the game does suffer from numerous glitches, which makes the game feel somewhat rushed and unfinished. The game actually crashed a few times for me, and there were numerous instances where I found smaller objects I could simply walk straight through. That said, these were not the biggest annoyances I experienced within the game. The levels (much like the game itself) are fairly short, and after each you are forced for wait for several minutes for the next section to load, while being showed various stats that seem fairly trivial and unnecessary. The chip abilities I previously mentioned do serve to add something a little different to the gameplay, but as there are only 3 available through the game, they get somewhat boring fairly quickly, and most levels are extremely repetitive, with occasional new enemy types being added, but without any real difficulty curve to speak of. Occasional boss fights break up the action, but both the boss fights and the frequent quick-time events make it hard for me to take a game particularly seriously. While it may seem like I’ve been fairly critical, most of these niggles are actually fairly minor, and don’t detract hugely from what is a solid (if unadventurous) shooter. I can’t fault the graphics too much, other than to say that they are fairly bloom-heavy, but that seems par for the course at the moment, and the soundtrack always fitted the action well. I’ve read that the co-op online mode is pretty good, and adds a lot to the otherwise limited lifespan of the game, but as I don’t have live, I couldn’t test it and as such can’t really comment. At its core though, Syndicate is a half-decent shooting game, and while I’m sure it won’t be up for any ‘Game Of The Year’ awards, you could do far worse.