Syndicate (PS3)
In EA’s 2012 reboot of the Syndicate series, developer Starbreeze Studios manages to create a cyberpunk world that, while featuring many familiar concepts from the genre, still sounds like a fascinating setting for a story. In the year 2069 national borders have been eroded as major corporations have achieved greater value and political leverage than traditional governments. The divisions extend beyond the economic territory of these large conglomerates though, as a second layer of experiencing reality exists in the form of the dataverse, a little over half of the population having chip implants able to interact with the world and specially developed technology in ways that allow for heightened perception and upwards mobility in a world where skyscrapers practically form a forest above the clouds at the biggest population centers.
In the world of Syndicate there are plenty of documents that delve deeper into the history and makeup of this company controlled version of Earth. It does have dour predictions for where unchecked capitalism can go, companies openly having hit squads and qualified agents whose job is specifically to ensure transactions or perform espionage in openly violent ways where civilian casualties are unimportant. Even humans are referred to in the system as “soft assets” to represent the prevalence of business-focused thought, but it still feels like it has a foot in reality at times. The documents you find with the juicy details on this setting are often written in a sometimes offputtingly dry manner or peppered with data and terminology that make certain aspects hard to parse, but enough of still manages to get the biggest and most important world-building details out as well as containing brief snapshots of how certain characters experience this world at different echelons of societal importance. Sometimes it clearly struggles to bridge the gap between how its world should communicate and what a player understands, still using the names of real world countries despite their supposed dissolution, but overall Syndicate’s world does feel like a cyberpunk setting that could be wonderful to try and take down as a moral monkey wrench in these global corporate machines.
Unfortunately, your only way to experience this world is from behind a gun.
Syndicate is a first-person shooter and one that never strays away from making sure the action is primarily focused on combat in some manner. You do sometimes get some very minor navigation challenges that involve activating tech with the dataverse or doing a sloppy running jump that will lead to you dying if you mess up, but you’ll mostly be utilizing whatever weapons are on hand and your minor combat-focused hacking skills to experience Syndicate’s world. You actually begin the game as one of the enforcers for one of the world’s largest companies, EuroCorp using you to test a new chip design meant to make its agents more deadly in the field. Your character doesn’t speak and has been raised for this purpose, but it’s pretty easy to anticipate that the game will eventually turn him away from being a mindless gun for the company to someone favoring a freer world and one where human life isn’t just a number to be crunched. The game does take an awfully long time to even get to the point where your character even considers such a change though, the game well over half over by the time it starts telling you that yes, the game did in fact know that your partner Merit shooting all those innocent people emotionlessly on a train was a bad look for him and the company’s overall morals.
While resisting the evil corporations controlling this world does take a while to really find its emotional core, you are at least only asked to shoot at people who are part of this system, civilian casualties not punished but also not necessary. Up until your cliche but very necessary epiphany, you’ll be gunning down the troops of other huge corporations like Aspari and Cayman-Global who are just as guilty as EuroCorp when it comes to creating this dystopia, and while you won’t be changing the entire world from the other side of the gun, the plot does at least suggest that your character Agent Kilo can potentially set some events into motion that could better the world.
The gunfights do at least take you to some interesting areas that you’ll be itching to see once they’re teased by documents. There are segments where you’ll be high up in those absurdly tall skyscrapers and able to see the clouds below, you’ll end up heading to the Downzone slums where people who lack brain chips squeak by in a world that’s deliberately locking them out, and while it might not sell the sensation too well with the visuals when you visit it, you do get to board a traveling city ship out on the ocean. Some interior spaces do inevitably blend together as it likes to maintain a level of corporate detachment when it comes to building design, but the linear progression through areas only feels truly samey when you’re somewhere behind the scenes since it would rather whip out unique locations like a train station or night club to punch up the important battle sites. There does seem to be a small issue with the game guiding you to which of the doors in an area will actually open, and sometimes the dataverse tech you need to find to open the way onward is finicky to activate or located in a weird spot. Mostly the areas serve their purposes well as places with cover or different elevations to spice up firefights, and some even allow you to activate or manipulate cover with your dataverse breaches, but these ideas feel like they’re more captivating as concept than they are in reality.
When it comes to the shooting, Syndicate is actually a fairly clean shooter. An assault rifle has the expected amount of kick to it, sniper rifles are slow to fire but can instantly kill from range with a good headshot, and pistols can still pack a punch if you aim for the right parts on an enemy. Some unique weapon options exist like the EMW-56 that lets you lock in energy shots that home in on the targets slightly or the Coil gun with its sustained laser, but it is mostly traditional weaponry or something with slight science fiction slant that doesn’t alter it too much. It can be a little awkward to feel out the optimal range for a shotgun though and the EMP grenades seemed equally as touchy when it comes to effectiveness, but a stock of traditional grenades can trivialize some bosses if used well and when you’re given a minigun or flamethrower it’s almost like the game allowing you a moment to go on an unopposed rampage compared to the careful firefights elsewhere. While Agent Kilo does have recovering health if he avoids danger for long enough, many encounters still require you to account for your reload time and anticipate enemy movements or flanking maneuvers to survive. A death can lead to a rather bothersome loading period and some enemies, especially bosses, have options that can wipe you out instantly, so strategy doesn’t always save your bacon. In fact, sometimes running in and snapping someone’s neck is better than attempting to open fire form afar and at other moments you’ll be torn to shreds because they’re smart enough to back up as you approach.
Different enemy types do start to spice up the action by having barriers you need to disable via the dataverse first, and some groups will be assisted by drones or people who block your dataverse tricks, but while these do ask for more depth in your approaches, many skirmishes still feel a little odd. You might be pinned down behind cover and firing your assault rifle at a group far off only to find they were somehow using shotguns to deal such heavy damage when yours can feel like it needs extremely close range to leave a mark. Even the way they fire pistols can make it seems like machine gun fire is coming in relentlessly. Numbers seems to be the game’s main advantage as you might think you’ve cleared things out only for some gunman to come in from the side and wipe you out, but you do at least have a few more tricks in your bag than regular weaponry.
Your connection to the dataverse gives you access to breaches, these not only disabling enemy shields or altering the landscape to raise or lower cover, but also adding new skills and advantages to a gunfight. Your DART view is perhaps the biggest boon, this letting you keep track of an enemy’s position even behind cover with a filter similar to heat-vision, but this also slows down time and increases the damage you dish out. After defeating boss characters you get upgrades that can even increase DART’s benefits further, making this a mode that not only assists in having a better understanding of the battle but makes you much more powerful for a brief period. DART is definitely the tool you’ll want to whip out the most despite its small recharge period and it’s not too hard to feel guilty about it when the game clearly places enemies to take you down quickly if you aren’t able to locate them in time.
Your other breach options take more time to build up power and are more available based on how efficient of a killer you are. The simplest is the backfire which makes a person’s gun malfunction, knocking them down to the ground and leaving them vulnerable. Suicide is a bleaker tool that compels an enemy troop to shoot themselves, the act even sending out a surge that can kill any soldiers who were near him when he does so. A bit more useful and flexible though is Persuade, which turns an enemy to your side until all nearby enemies are wiped out. Backfire’s impact is low but it is available most often so its easy to mix in there, but Suicide only really pays off if foes stay grouped up even though they are usually wise enough to move away from your target. Persuade at least gives you a decoy and extra gunner in the fight so you can start finding moments to strike distracted attackers or move away from cover safely since the pressure isn’t all on you. These three options do add to the combat for sure despite their limitations and sometimes small impact, but beyond DART they’re more cool toys to call on rather than something that adds that extra layer of depth you’d hope to find beyond the inherently well built first-person shooting mechanics.
The boss design feels a little all over the place though, some being about utilizing the environment and planning your attacks well, others just feeling like they’re more about putting in the time to wear down a health bar, and one particularly bland one being about redirecting missiles over and over rather than really fighting the opponent, but much like the shooting, the mixture of quality pretty much comes out average since the tougher ones don’t redeem the boring ones.
One area with a bit more promise is the co-op campaign that features areas inspired by the older Syndicate games. These are mission-based rather than story focused, with nine challenges starting to tap into more tactical firefights with their designs. Areas are limited in their scope and the game expects you to come with some extra players who all can pick specialized classes, with new breach powers like player shielding being limited use and strategically important since activating them at the right time can overcome these challenges. You can see the enemies spawn in and the game is not trying so hard to be believable, but the difficulty and need to rely on other players adds more texture to the shooting as you really do need to plan your attacks better, activate powers wisely, and can’t play sloppily since you’d experience a full mission restart on team death. While this mode may take away much of the captivating concepts the story gets to brush up against, it does better nail challenging gunfights and battles with more layers to them. These extra mode does help to balance out the game more, but thankfully there isn’t too much wrong with it, just a lot of missed opportunities or areas where the focus could have been better used to ensure either the shooting was captivating on its own or your window to this cyberpunk world was deeper than documents and cutscenes.
THE VERDICT: Syndicate’s cyberpunk world controlled by corporations and a data overlay for reality feels like fertile ground for something richer than this fairly plain first-person shooter. The gun play works well for most of your options and the game lays out some areas decent for supporting it, but your breaches and DART overlay don’t really inject the amount of extra life or strategy that could make these battles more thrilling. The co-op mode manages to draw this out better at least as the difficulty rises and squad tactics become prevalent. Ultimately though it feels a lot more like a serviceable sci-fi shooter like TimeShift that mixes in little gimmicks to the first-person action than something like a Deus Ex game where you can experience and interact with an interesting world better than just firing your guns at the latest group of baddies.
And so, I give Syndicate for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. By no means is the shooting in Syndicate bad, many of the guns handling well and filling their roles in the typical weapon hierarchy of the genre. Breaches come in an add a bit more identity to the firefights when they’re available, even if some feel too situational and there can be long periods before you’re allowed to tinker with cover or sway an enemy turret to your side. The control of cover sometimes channels that direction taken in Gears of War 2 but the actual gunfights here don’t feel like they have the same energy to them since you need to hold back a lot and anticipate enemies appearing from your sides. The backdrop that is the world of Syndicate really could have helped boost up the play experience by giving you more ways to play than just opening fire on the newest batch of soldiers, but your breaches are almost always combat focused and the goal remains to kill your way to the next area. Starbreeze Studios made sure that act is at least pretty fun except when a bland boss battle arises, but more strategy and diverse approaches to victory would have benefited the single player in the same way they do the co-op.
It’s still hard not to desire a chance to really explore this world or have more meaningful interactions with it than just opening fire on the targets you’re instructed to hit. Keeping some of its ideas grounded but still creating a corporate dystopia has potential for a deeper world to explore, but as mentioned earlier, the Deus Ex games essentially do that and that might be why Syndicate seems so simple comparatively. Syndicate has the ideas for it but goes for the basic route of a first-person shooter with a few little extras thrown on, and while it’s not at all bad, it didn’t emphasize its best elements so it ends up not having the strong identity or diversity it needs to rise above being an alright shooting game.