My never-ending quest to get through all my video games is hampered
by my love/hate relationship with long form role-playing games and strategy titles,
requiring levels of commitment that often take months to get through an entire
game, if I ever manage it. That being the case, it was a refreshing change to
play a relatively short game!
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| Your HUD - Heads Up Display - is in an AR system that goes across your field of view. |
Syndicate, then. I might as well address the elephant in the
room right now: I never played the original games that were released back in
the 90s so I had no basis for comparison between the two different iterations
of the game. For how many people have snarled at this 2012 Xbox 360 title for
not being as good as the original game, it reviewed surprisingly well at the
time, but I wasn’t tempted to buy it until it was on sale at a second-hand game
shop, on the basis that I’d found the game on Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos.
Syndicate on the Xbox 360 is a first-person shooter game
with hacking elements, set in a grim Cyberpunk world of mega-corporations,
asset wars and a downtrodden forgotten people. You play as Miles Kilo, an Agent,
an augmented super-soldier created to enforce the mega-corporations they’re
attached to. So far, so Shadowrun meets Deus Ex.[1]
Your initial goal is to eliminate corporate rivals and protect your company
assets through a series of linear levels, but as is very often the case with
games like this, nothing is as it seems…
Looking back at that previous paragraph I’m not surprised to
recall I’ve ended a few opening descriptions with “nothing is as it seems.”
There’s nothing wrong with that; plot writers and consumers love a good twist
and imagining a nightmare future where western life is bartered with and ended
on the whim of the people in charge is sufficiently compelling enough to
engage. But when I played Syndicate, it was hard to escape an exhausted sigh of
“haven’t we been here before?” You just know the huge corporation you’re
working for will turn out to be behind it all along, and that the people you
thought were friends were enemies and the other way around. It tells the story
reasonably well – it’s just that even at the time there was nothing new here.
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| No health bar here - your injuries are displayed by the blood splatter effects on the screen. |
As for gameplay, the shooting mechanics work reasonably well;
we’d reached a point in gaming history when controls were standardised, so it
was pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Syndicate gets it wrong anyway by
forcing you to equip grenades like any other weapon before you could throw it,
rather than mapping it to one of the buttons, but other than that, it works OK.
What Syndicate brings to the table is hacking mechanics and what the game calls
a DART-6 system, where you go into a Matrix-like view of the stage, slowing
down time, making enemies easier to see and I think you do more damage as well.
Hacking objects in the game basically amounts to activating switches remotely,
but things get interesting when you start to use them on enemies – causing their
weapons to backfire, forcing them to commit suicide, or even fight for you for
a few moments. This is a way of balancing out otherwise hopeless fights and
when used well can produce some positive results. It is almost crucial for the
boss battles, which are entertaining, challenging, and one of the few things
Syndicate does well – each has its own gimmick and method to defeat them, and
it’s up to you to figure it out.
The level design is accurate in its theme, but uninspired
and dull with repeated corridor and open sections. That might have been the
whole point, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting game! The graphics and
sound are good, with some harsh edges and lighting effects that make for a
unique if unsettling experience.
Syndicate is a standard experience with flashes of
brilliance in places, hinting that the game could have been so much more. It
won’t change your life, but it’s worth a look at least.
Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.
[1]
Not that I’ve played a massive amount of either, but I’ve heard enough about
them to know the general overlaying themes!
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