Backlog Beatdown: Taking down the Syndicate with Syndicate

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!

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.

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.

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[1] Not that I’ve played a massive amount of either, but I’ve heard enough about them to know the general overlaying themes!

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Might and Magic X, Syndicate

This has been a busy week for me with birthday arrangements, so I’ve not found much time to play many games – and the one I managed was another pick-up-and-play job.

How many of you have wondered what
Goro is packing down there?

I speak of course of Mortal Kombat, where after trying for weeks to beat the game with Scorpion, I finally managed to do it with Johnny Cage. It’s been an interesting journey for me since I have been recognising a lot more of the technical aspect of the game, rather than just brutalising the opponents, fun though that is. In Cage’s case, what won it for me was his special moves – for their additional effects as much as their damage. As with most of the characters, using them is not without risk, as they don’t return to their ready positions for a second or two, which makes them vulnerable to reprisals. With Cage, the Shadow Kick gives a great knockback effect, but if your opponent blocks it, they can very easily follow through with additional attacks. The Force Ball, however, won the game for me, because it stuns your opponent for a precious moment for you to either get your bearings or launch a follow-up attack. I never even did the split punch, as the command for it is fiddlier than the version that appeared on the Sega Megadrive and it was rarely useful.

As usual, the end of the game came down to the last credit (I wouldn’t have it any other way!) and a lot of it depends on what Shang Tsung morphs in to on the final level, but I managed to come through and beat the game. Cage’s ending, while not canon, nonetheless is representative of the direction his character made in the later editions of the game – in spirit, if not in activity!

The Naga Temple. Might need to grind some XP before
I tackle that bit again.

About a week ago I had a go with Might and Magic X on my laptop. Might and Magic sounds right up my alley in terms of game theme, but I’d never really played one before because the reviews I’d seen on the game were coming up at the bottom end of average at best. However, the games in the series were on sale, I bought it, and the other week I played it. I quite liked it, as well. It’s a role-playing game that basically works on a grid; even though it is a first-person game, the game works by moving your characters to certain squares on the grid and filling in the map from your line of sight as they go. On the one hand this is unrealistic, on the other hand, I quite like games that remember they’re only games, so I ran with it and was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I was having. The nearest game I’ve played to this so far has been the Legend of Grimrock, but the difference here is that the game progresses when you act, so whatever you can see will only move when you move. This works well for me as it gives me time to figure out what to do, as opposed to dealing with Grimrock’s horribly clunky interface in real time. Whether I’ll see it through to the end or not, I don’t know – it’s actually quite rare for me to do that with RPGs, as regular readers of the blog will know – but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

I played Syndicate at some point as well and managed to get through the level where you must make your way through the Downzone. This is interesting as you can no longer rely on your hacking powers to kill your enemies, as the better ones are shut down. It also ended in a boss battle where the enemy uses stealth, which took a few goes, mainly because he explodes when he dies, and because I didn’t realise this, he killed me too the first few times. It took the story in a direction where, as I’m sure is quite common in Cyberpunk games, the lines between good and evil are blurred, and you don’t know who to trust – a familiar trope, but it works well for these games.

Last Week's Games: The Ultimate Doom, Syndicate

This week I’ve spent most of my time playing the Ultimate Doom. I reached the end of the Inferno episode a week or so ago, and I’m now trying to play through the levels of the fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed. I’d tried this before and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult these levels were, I don’t think I ever got past the first level when I played Doom before on the Xbox – and that’s when I was playing it on standard difficulty; I’m at Ultra Violence now! I ended up watching a video on YouTube to show me how to get past it, and while it helped me on the first level and shown me what to do on the second, I haven’t got the accuracy to pull it off yet. Hopefully I’ll do it in the future!

I've used this picture before, somewhere...

Now I’m aware that these levels are designed to be very difficult; indeed, the first two levels are supposed to be the hardest levels in the entire Doom franchise. I’ve also sung the praises of Id Software’s level design in the past, celebrating what they managed to achieve with very limited resources. So, are the levels on Thy Flesh Consumed well-designed? I reckon they are. They’re tough, no doubt about that, but they include some quite unique puzzles of deciding what to do and in what order, knowing where the weapons are, and what is appropriate to use and when. For example, before last week I’d never even have considered wasting ammo for the plasma gun on shotgunners. These days, I’ve developed an instinct for making sure all the hitscan-wielding enemies die very quickly, as they’re arguably more deadly than even the toughest demons.

If you don’t know, hitscan weapons are guns in early video games that don’t faff about with things like bullet velocity or trajectory – you point at the thing, press fire, and the shot instantly connects. In Doom, this is how the Pistol, Shotgun and Chain gun work, and why the Shotgun is pretty much the most commonly used weapon. If enemies have such weapons, which a number of early ones do in Doom, there’s usually a delay between the monster seeing you and shooting you to give you time to react – but if they get a shot off, you have no way of dodging it. This is different from the fireballs launched by the Imps, Cacodemons and Barons of Hell, as those enemies shoot projectiles you can see coming and can dodge. It’s also why the Spider Demon is the final boss of the game, rather than the Cyber Demon which guards the end of the second episode. Even though the latter has the stronger gun, its shots are easily seen coming, whereas the Spider Demon has a hitscan chain gun and you don’t get as much of a chance to dodge. (It’s still quite easy to beat if you don’t kill the other demons, as it will be distracted by them.)

So, defeating these levels will be a learning process, but I’m happy to accept the challenge!

Looks like quite a nice day, actually!

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Syndicate on the Xbox 360. I mentioned this last week and having played through a little more of it I can say that this is probably going to be another average game. It’s got some good ideas, like hacking the enemy chips to force them to break cover or shoot their allies. But in fight after fight, their use becomes quite routine, and the occasions where their use is obvious don’t contribute to the challenge of the game. I’d also probably appreciate it more if I hadn’t played the first two Bioshock games to their endings, as what they do to develop the idea of single player shooters added a lot more to the experience. Some critics have said Syndicate was rubbish, and I’m not disagreeing with them; most of them will have played better games than this. It’s not as bad as all that, and I’m having a decent amount of fun with it, but I doubt I’ll feel the need to come back to it once I reach the end.

Let’s see if I can beat a game before the end of the month…

Last Week's Games: SWOS, Sine Mora, Mortal Kombat, Syndicate, Funky Chicken, Monster Match

I've never once played as Juventus.

I’ve been quite busy with work this week so the vast majority of the games I’ve been playing have been “pick up and play” games, when I needed to either pass half an hour or switch my brain off for considerably longer than half an hour. I’ve been playing Sensible World of Soccer on the Xbox 360; as the matches are only a few minutes long and there’s never really an awkward place to stop if I need to. I’m still terrible at it, although I did manage to get the achievement points for scoring a goal off a diving header – incidentally, the only time I’ve a been able to capitalise on a corner. But I enjoy the game enough to keep going at it, and maybe at some point I’ll get good enough at it to win more than one game per season. Yeah. It’s that bad.

One of the massive overblown boss battles
these games are famous for...

I also had another go at Sine Mora, the great shoot-em-up that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. I’m not much better at this, to be perfectly honest, but analysing attack patterns and making the most of your opportunities is half of the fun of these games so I expect I’ll dive in to it whenever I feel like giving it a go – though I doubt I’ll ever be put the time in to it necessary to score the higher grades, even if I do manage to clear the game in the end!

I recently read that the actor's costume
didn't actually fit him properly...

On my laptop, I keep coming back to Mortal Kombat every now and then. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I played this game initially, but I’ve got into a rhythm of the control scheme now, got used to some of the things you need to do to win the fights, and even beat the game with Sub-Zero at one point. Sub-Zero is probably the easiest character to do this with simply because of his freezing powers; I don’t even know how to do the floor slide but being able to stop the opponent moving for a second or two often provides me with the opportunity I need to do a lot of damage and take the win. I’ve been trying to beat the game with Scorpion ever since; I tend to favour the two ninjas over the other characters in the first game because they have a slightly longer reach with their kicks. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the two boss characters, Goro and Shang Tsung, rarely provide the same challenge as the mid-game. They’re powerful – Goro requires a lot of patience, and Shang Tsung’s flaming skulls do a horrible amount of damage – but they’re nothing compared to the endurance matches you must go through to get there. Pretty much all the characters you’ve previously defeated turn up again for this, and characters with high mobility – Kano and Rayden, for example – make for a very significant challenge. If those two are paired together, you’re in for a long fight. I’ve played many Mortal Kombat games in my time, and I’m not the slightest bit surprised that, as far as I know, the first game was the only one to include endurance matches in the main game…

Run 'em and Gun 'em.

I also played Syndicate on the Xbox 360. Now, obviously this game isn’t a patch on the strategy game that came out in the 1990s, because nothing ever is. (I’ve had similar conversations with people who enjoyed the first X-COM games as well.) However, I never actually played Syndicate in the 1990s, so that wasn’t going to put me off! It’s a standard First-Person Shooter game with some hacking mechanics that reminded me more of Bioshock than anything else. It’s pretty good; I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s nice to play a cyberpunk game – it’s not a setting I’m massively familiar with! Hopefully I will see it through to the end.

Finally, my daughter bought me two games for Father’s Day: Funky Chicken and Monster Match. These are developed by the same lads who brought us Happy Salmon, and they’ve got the same level of fun attached to them! We’ve had a go with both, but I think I’ll talk about how that went down in a separate blog.