Bonjourno, First things first in this review, I have to air my bias; I’m a pretty big fan of Starbreeze, those crazy Swedes have something a little special. I’ve only played two of their games and I think they’re just amazing they capture something a fair few games capture which is humanity. I really thought the Darkness was probably one of the most depressing games I’ve ever played but it was amazing that it could deliver that depth of feeling and make you care about the characters to that extent.
Escape from Butcher Bay was awesome, truthfully I didn’t even think the films were that great until I played that game, really added another side to the character or Riddick and it was amazing to be in his shoes. So what I’m trying to say is Syndicate has a lot to live up to in my eyes, I have high hopes, which is never a good thing with games.
Syndicate is a game set in a dystopian future world where corporations have basically gotten rid of the whole facade of being regulated by government and instead have just divided the world between them. So it’s basically like McDonalds bought their own pmc and took over America and coke has bought England and all the CEOs live in a floating forts surrounded by dolphins with lazer cannons grafted to their heads. And everyone who doesn’t like that lives in the gutter in poverty eating rats or whatever, a bit like demolition man but with more genocide and less men in dresses.My initial reaction was typical Starbreeze you’re dropped straight into the action no faffing about just tied to chair getting the shit kicked out of you by a faceless motherless asswipe, all good so far. Then you’re given the option to kill him which is good but it probably would have been better to give me that option before he started wailing on you, but whatever. So after taking care of this guy I notice the controls are pretty standard fps, the movement is pretty nice you can sprint and slide and jump.
The lighting is fantastic, as with most Starbreeze I’ve come in contact with, lots of nice over saturation of light, in the darkness and in butcher bay; light is a real oppressive force obviously literally in the darkness, the light is harsh I really like the contrast of the light and the dark, I think lighting is a very important part of a games cinematography that is overlooked by too many games and which is one of my main criticisms of the darkness 2, I mean you didn’t even really need to shoot out lights in that game.
I reach a door and you’re supposed to run and charge through it, so upon doing so I fall off the ledge on the other side of the door and die, I do it again and I get stuck in the door. It’s something I usually overlook, I’m not really one to get hung up on glitches, they happen to the best of games. The combat system is really punchy and sharp and clean, it’s really nice and you can use the matrix vis.... I mean dart overlay! You can slow time and do some slow mo sliding and shooting, but I think the finest point of this whole game is the sprinting because I think it’s the first game I’ve ever played where you can shoot and sprint at the same time.
All other games when you sprint the character for some reason loses all control of their arms but in this Kilo (Main character forgot to mention that, ah it’s not that important anyway) aims forward with the pistol so you can like dive bomb people with bullets which is awesome, it only works with pistols though and most of the time if you use it against lots of enemies you’ll end up right in the middle of them with a few lead piercing in your face.
So then you reach the end of this mission and Brian Cox (He’s the CEO of the company which is hilarious since his name is Denim like the boss on the IT Crowd) and Rosario Dawson and that guy on robin hood prince of thieves that doesn’t understand why killing someone with a spoon would be bad, oh yeah he was also on the crow and he might as well have “I’m going to die or turn evil” tattooed on his face, and they all go “Surprise”.
It was all just a long contrived training exercise and all the people you slaughtered were just your colleagues and co-workers on a really messed up team building exercise. So after first picking my jaw up off the floor after a couple of movie stars walked into my game without my knowledge I noticed that they were all shaking incontrollable and I was like, “Well maybe in the future everyone has Parkinson because of all the gizmos they have shoved up their butts, I mean I’d probably feel a bit shaky if my penis doubled as a whisk”. Alas no yet another annoying glitch and where as I could overlook the others this was shaking the very fabric of this games realism, it’s just hard to take someone seriously when they’re pointing a gun at you if they just can’t stop fidgeting.
Still though the last game I saw Brian Cox in was Manhunt and that was amazing, it tested the fabric of the gaming industry, it is arguably one of the most controversial games in history and a work of pure brilliance. So I can be forgiven for thinking this game was going to be amazing.
So at the beginning of the first ‘real’ mission and I’m starting to notice your cohort Merit is a bit of a nut case as he executes people armed or unarmed like he’s picking up plastic wrap for his basement murder room. There’s even a point in the game where he executes a bunch of innocent civilians just for being there, and here I was thinking he was going to die or turn evil when he’s pretty evil already.
In a strange way I liked it though, not because I’m a sicko and I’m sat here strangle-wanking myself while I read Dan Brown novels but because it makes a criticism of how corporations think on the macro scale enacted on the micro scale. A few lives to a corporation don’t matter to them as long as they can turn a profit because they’re so far from the actual act it’s like it never happened but to see that kind of ambivalence up close is really shocking even in a videogame.
You yourself can execute all the civilians you want, it seems to be a theme of Starbreeze to make games about anti-heroes. You get a nifty power to make people commit suicide and change sides and dance and pick their noses and kiss.
But it’s all just so much icing on a terribly dry rivita, it’s really just another way to point at someone and make them dead, which guns are pretty good at.
The boss fights are absolutely rubbish because typically none of your powers work on them so you just have to shoot them but on top of that they have much cooler powers and can use them on you. The first boss is superfast and can teleport and dodge bullets and create copies of himself and I’m sat here thinking; “How is it I can win this?” Another could jump really high and I forget the rest. The point is why can’t I do that? I wanna do that!
Then there are like tough enemies that need to be ‘breached’ before you can damage them (breaching is their clever and original word for hacking), which isn’t really very complicated you just hold down one of the triggers, it doesn’t really add anything it just makes killing an enemy one step harder, it’s just annoying. Like simon says die, you can’t hurt me until you do this, this and this, and then I realised this is live action filler, in game time wasting. I think it’s the first system in an fps I’ve seen which seems like it is actually put there to deliberately elongate combat sequences.
Breaching is just a long range use button anyone, you can do absolutely pointless things like raise and lower cover and interact with various things which sound good but in the heat of battle you don’t regularly look around first and think; “Ooh I can hack the toaster and shoot burnt toast at them, which will distract them long enough for me to talk the vacuum cleaner into murdering them!”.
It’s let down by the fact you only get three powers and they don’t really add much variety or do that much, you could easily go through the game without them and the upgrade system is just a tiled menu of tediously increasing numbers and percentages, whereas Deus Ex which in my mind is this games main rival has this amazing upgrade system that just goes around Adam’s whole body like a really anal racing game and you just decide if he needs new lungs or eyes or the ability to grate cheese with his face.
Although the way you get the upgrade points is cooler because you have to kill rival agents and extract the chips from their heads in a sort of “eat their brains gain their knowledge” kind of dealy. Which does trump Deus Ex as you just have to go down the local cyborg shop and buy them. As a side note I also like how the powers are called apps, which makes it sound like Kilo is a big homicidal iphone.
It’s kind of refreshing to be playing a game with an old school levels system that grades your performance at the end and gives you a rank that makes it sound like you work in an office. On the other hand I’d been playing for quite some time and I realised the story is either really long and expansive and I haven’t even scratched the surface yet and this is some massively elongated opening to the actual story where I’m told nothing and have no idea what’s going on or this is it and there just isn’t one.
Sadly it was the latter. I really don’t know how Starbreeze thought they could get away with making two awesome fps’ like the darkness and escape from butcher bay with amazing main characters and then bring out a game with the typical cop-out fps silent protagonist and just bung some famous people in it.
It’s a bit of a daunting conclusion, “Is this Starbreeze without a safety net?” the other games I love come with ready-made brilliant characters taken from a popular film and a comic, so they already had storylines and interesting characters they just built a game around them whereas this is them flying solo because this is based on an ancient game created by Aztecs or myans or aliens, and it shows as there basically is no storyline. Just loads and loads of innocuous pieces of text all over the place which in some incomprehensible way is supposed to form a back story.
I just didn’t feel the need to waste my time reading it all, whereas in other games reading emails and bios is interesting periodically and adds another layer of story like in resident evil and skyrim, finding letters and notes left behind telling a story, there was too much to read, just walls of uninteresting text. It just felt like there was a story but I wasn’t involved, it was happening behind closed doors and I wasn’t allowed to see because I’m just a bag man.I don’t think the game has a single likeable character, I mean there’s a vague attempt at a back story for kilo but he’s supposed to be a hollow mandroid so it’s like “Aww that tamagochi had a hard life”, and even the down trodden masses who live in the horrible under city are right bastards, hell bent on killing/raping/dismantling you and your powers don’t work on them because they don’t have iphones.
I mean maybe my expectations were too high but they were bound to be, they bring out these two awesome games then their new game is just sort of run of the mill, the game isn’t bad, it’s a fun game but I expected more, I expected life and story and great sub-missions and a mystical union of mirrors edge and deus ex and I didn’t really get any of that, it’s just average.
Syndishit 
