Syndicate

Title: Syndicate
Platform Played On: Xbox 360
Release Date: February 21, 2012
Date Played: September 2012
Time Played: 10 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 4/5



Opinion:
I never thought there would be a 'new' Syndicate game. While the 90's Genesis/SNES game made quite a stir among gamers the franchise has been largely forgotten, so when EA announced in 2011 that there was going to be a new Syndicate game I got really excited.

The original (and it's few remakes) were all top down (isometric) squad shooter/RPG hybrids. This new take on the franchise is a straight up first person shooter with some of the elements from those old Syndicate games.

The overall plot stays the same, corporations rule the world, and you are an agent of one of those corporations (EuroCorp). You are not a good guy, or a bad guy, you are a tool. Your objective is to protect the interests of the company, beyond that everything is permitted.

Syndicate (1993)

In the world of Syndicate everyone has a chip in their head that enhances their natural abilities. You as a super duper agent of awesome are able to hack those chips and use them to your advantage to turn the tide of battle. There are three main things you can do when hacking someone else's chip. You can force them to suicide, you can force them to turn on their friends and fight at your side, and you can make their weapons explode. All of these hacks are fueled by adrenaline, so you can not just spam them on every guy, you need to do some traditional fighting in order to recharge the adrenaline. The chip also allows you to see people through walls, and hack electrical devices, armors and just in general be a bad ass.

As you progress through the game you will encounter other people with bad ass chips in their heads (generally bosses). By killing them and ripping out their chip you can backwards engineer the technology and earn upgrades to your own tech.

Syndicate runs in a proprietary "Starbreeze" engine, it resembles the Battlefield 3's Frostbite engine, and looks pretty damn good. There is a lot of blur and occlusion effects as well as really good lighting and particle effects. Syndicate easily looks like a PC game running on the consoles.

Syndicate's story will take you through many unfamiliar looking yet familiar sounding locations (such as Inglewood and Los Angeles), but since its the year 2069, anything hardly looks the same.

Syndicate has a few very minor flaws. There were a couple of times where it was unclear as to what my objective was, I would spend as long as 5 minutes running around trying to figure out that it wanted me to do a hack on some hidden back panel and then do a leaping jump into nothingness. I have found myself in a situation like that 3 or 4 times while playing through the game. Another issue is the pretty crazy difficulty spikes. The game will go from normally paced level to a boss that will take 10 thousand bullets to the face, or a room full of enemies rushing you from all sides. While some of those sections were a bit frustrating, the fun of shooting things up in Syndicate made it easy to overlook.

Overall Syndicate is a very competent shooter. It can be compared to the last year's Deus Ex (minus the choices), and I really enjoyed playing it. The difficulty spikes and confusion on where to go can be easily overlooked when the rest of the package is so damn good. I feel that if you like futuristic shooters playing through Syndicate is a no brainer.

My Statistics Upon Completion Of The Game