Syndicate Review
Competent sci-fi FPS that borrows from the leaders of the genre. Single player misses but the co-op has some interesting qualities.
Most of the game takes place in New York, specifically bland, square, futuristic office buildings. You visit a city on the ocean that would make Kevin Costner proud. There is also a foray in the slums of New York with enemies waiting patiently to jump up from floor grates like a jack-in-the-box. Apart from the change in location the gameplay remains the same. Thankfully the enemy AI is quite good, flanking your position and holding ground patiently. Civilians caught in the crossfire seem to think the best way to avoid danger is to lie down in the middle of a room and squirm. To offset the monotonous locations, the game changes pace for a few brief sections.
Two of these changes in pace involve the use of extremely overpowered weapons. They allow you to wade through hoards of standard enemies without problem or pause. This is actually a fairly standard gameplay trait from Starbreeze. Like their other games though, these brief sections of empowerment are too contrived and have little connection to the story to incite enjoyment. There are few, good memorable sections in the campaign. Most bad sections involve the terrible boss fights.
Ammo would help for this boss battle
Not all the boss fights are bad, but a few that will get on your nerves. The first boss fight, a nimble agent who can duplicate himself, took an enormous amount of bullets to kill. The developers recognised this and populated the area with floating robots that drop ammo. I shot quite a few out of the air before realising they were there to help. No other section in the game had these ammo distributing robots. When you die against this boss, you may reload to have him shooting you in the face from point blank range.
Another boss, equipped with a jetpack and rocket launcher, needed to be defeated without any weapons at all. You run back and forth, destroying jamming emitters and breaching incoming rockets. This repetitive process could go on for 10 minutes if you are unlucky. It’s not particularly hard once you know what to do but the first few times you are playing trial and error. The biggest problem with boss fights is that they are harder than the rest of the game. It stalls the experience or makes you stop playing all together. At least in multiplayer you can team up against annoying bosses.
The co-op portion of Syndicate has some great ideas although still somewhat let down by the same problems in the single player. Four nondescript agents are your avatars for the online portion. They wear grey leather trench coats as homage to the original Syndicate games. This time you are not working for Eurocorp, taking hammy mission briefings from somebody who sounds a lot like Nolan North. The locations in co-op have you travelling over the globe from Australia to Scandinavia. The nine co-op missions are mostly unique with only minor crossover between the campaign.
The big change in co-op is the ability to remotely heal your teammates within line of sight. It makes for some genuinely interesting tactics and allows the trailing players to contribute. You are also encouraged to join forces by breaching bosses and devices concurrently. There is no slow motion in co-op, but you still get bonuses when using the DART overlay. You proceed through areas defeating enemies, opening gates, hacking turrets and collecting items. You might need to defend a moving robot or protect a drop ship. End scenarios will likely have you facing tougher bosses that require multiple breaches and plenty of bullets.
In co-op healing and protecting your team is the key to success
There is plenty to unlock in multiplayer, through weapons and agent applications. You acquire tokens from missions to unlock research for weapon upgrades. You can also upgrade your agent with health bonuses, explosion protection or recharge improvements. In addition there are specific co-op powers, similar to perks, that might provide shielding or squad heal abilities. Four player co-op is constant action, even when you are standing still. The constant momentum is a big positive and makes it easy to keep playing.
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