Posted By Johnny Maloney about 3 months ago
Special Delivery! Bullets!
I just want to get this out of the way here, that I know what a launch trailer is. It’s usually a piece of edited footage (either actual or NOT actual gameplay, usually dependent on how confident your publisher is that the game can sell itself) released in tandem with the game in an attempt to convince people who have not yet pre-ordered the game that THEY ARE MISSING THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES.
Electronic Arts has decided to push that forward though. No, not the actual launch, just the trailer that says “launch” on it. Surely, people undecided about spending their money are going to make that final decision based on almost two minutes of footage, right? It’s not as though reponsible gamers will wait until the game has seen enough daylight to hear what respectable critics, or friends have to say about it. Feel the crushing weight of corporate marketing!
… And now I’m worried again. I have to admit, I was feeling pretty good about the Syndicate reboot, reserving my concerns for just one front: the plot. The classic isometric strategy game never made any pretenses about ethical awakenings or moral high ground. In the end, it was all about corporate subjugation and taxing the life right out of a populace so you could buy your agent a pair of brand new legs and a new adrenal gland. Interestingly enough though, they managed to do all this without necessarily making you the bad guy, because if you’re not the one brainwashing the people, your competitors are. The idea of having a free-thought based, ethical alternative doesn’t even factor into the equation. Maybe I’m just being crotchety, “elite,” and ridden with unshakeable nostalgia though, as it’s difficult to completely call a game based on two minutes of footage… even if it is a “launch” trailer.
Syndicate is releasing in North America on February 21st, and to the rest of the world on February 24th.
Links: Syndicate Website
Electronic Arts’ Syndicate license is poised to come back in a big way. Starbreeze is poised to cement themselves as a creative, imaginative development studio. Johnny is poised right behind you to tell you about both. Don’t make any sudden movements, he startles easily.
One final Syndicate trailer to whet some appetites. But if this is the launch trailer, what do we call the one they release when the game launches? The post launch trailer?
Electronic Arts is dangling the shiny keys of Hollywood actors in front of us again. Only this time, it’s all business… Truthfully, it’s always been all business – I just thought I’d say that because it was Syndicate.
Augmentations? We never asked for this. (Still awesome though)
Dear mom, After joining up with EuroCorp, I’ve met plenty of friends. Each of them is fairly quiet and shy in their own way, but we’ve found a number of activities to bond over – such as raiding a rival corporations manufacturing headquarters and killing dozens of private security employees.
EuroCorp likes their employees happy. Well, EuroCorp likes their employees to at least think they’re happy. Early next year, you’re going to be serving corporate interests, mainly with a few express bullet deliveries.
Electronic Arts’ Syndicate license is poised to come back in a big way. Starbreeze is poised to cement themselves as a creative, imaginative development studio. Johnny is poised right behind you to tell you about both. Don’t make any sudden movements, he startles easily.
One final Syndicate trailer to whet some appetites. But if this is the launch trailer, what do we call the one they release when the game launches? The post launch trailer?
Electronic Arts is dangling the shiny keys of Hollywood actors in front of us again. Only this time, it’s all business… Truthfully, it’s always been all business – I just thought I’d say that because it was Syndicate.
Augmentations? We never asked for this. (Still awesome though)
Dear mom, After joining up with EuroCorp, I’ve met plenty of friends. Each of them is fairly quiet and shy in their own way, but we’ve found a number of activities to bond over – such as raiding a rival corporations manufacturing headquarters and killing dozens of private security employees.
EuroCorp likes their employees happy. Well, EuroCorp likes their employees to at least think they’re happy. Early next year, you’re going to be serving corporate interests, mainly with a few express bullet deliveries.
Posted By Johnny Maloney about 2 months, 4 weeks ago
Syndicate Review
Syndicate Review
I have to get this out of the way right now, or else something horrible will happen to me on a biological level. I felt as though I was really invested in the reboot of Syndicate this year, as it is in the good company of excellent, recent re-imaginings, such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While it shares a nostalgic market with impending titles, such as XCOM or Thief 4, you can bank on the fact that names alone won’t keep gamers from getting bored of directors who affix undercooked games to venerated licenses. As such, it’s important to take stock of these things impartially, no matter how high a pedestal we raise the source material on.
Whew. That’s better. I honestly thought I might explode from unused wordplay for a second there.
| PROS | Design, Multiplayer, More than Just Your Average FPS |
| CONS | Writing, The Pretense of Depth, Hamstrings Itself, Short Campaign |
| WTF?! | I saw it! A Church of the New Epoch mention! |
Syndicate is a first person shooter, designed by Starbreeze Studios, published by Electronic Arts, and based on an old Bullfrog Productions RTS about a future dominated by corporate interests. In it, world governments have slowly collapsed over the past fifty years, national borders dissolving and giving way to areas populated by droves of citizens who attach themselves to their corporation of choice, having computer chips injected right into their brains. These chips keep people continually connected to “the dataverse,” but as you can also imagine, divides society into a cartoonish binary of the wealthy, connected, elite, and the downtrodden, anarchistic, Molotov-cocktail wielding cliché hobo.
Language barrier problems? Don't worry – everybody speaks 'Gun'
Enter Miles Kilo, a physically enhanced, genetically superior enforcer for Eurocorp, top corporate dog of the eastern seaboard of the United States of America. Fitted with, what we are assured, state of the art enhancements including, but not limited to, the brand new Dart 6 chip, Miles Kilo has a bright future ahead of himself in the world of Eurocorp; he only needs to keep the company’s interests in focus, and do what needs to be done.
Once injected into the world of EA’s new Syndicate, it becomes quite easy to be impressed. The colors are rich, the lighting is stark and dramatic, the environments are varied, and even the level designs are quite innovative. Starbreeze has done a fantastic job of avoiding purely two plane movement, excellently including a good amount of all three axes of direction in their level designs, making it easy to not notice how linear the single player campaign is (not that linear is necessarily bad). The physical presence of Kilo is similarly refreshing, having his interaction with cover, landing from a tall height, manual actions like opening a door, or even the way he handles his firearms makes him convincingly present.
Neo, I hate to tell you this, but you're not the one. You're just *really* high.
The special skills you command as the player do give an added depth to what would be a decently constructed, but average shooter. Generating the ability to drop into bullet ti… I mean, Dart 6 overlay puts a Matrix flair on things, slowing time down, and adding to your ability to deal and soak damage while active. Killing enemies in streaks pumps adrenaline into your system, the fuel for Dart 6, charging the ability to compel guns to backfire, opponents to commit suicide, or even join your cause. These abilities, and other basic armor or health based bonuses are unlocked by the player over the course of the game, whenever intriguing new tech finds its way out of somebody else’s head and into your hands. The first few levels of the game are quite intoxicating, bouncing around from cover to cover, exploding a rifle in someone’s hands, and barreling up to them to break their neck with a melee attack.
So..pretty much like the last Shadowrun game then ? More like mediocre spinoff than a “real” entry ?
I’d say this was pretty accurate. Like I’ve said before, you can definitely tell that this takes place in a Syndicate universe but it’s not really the next Syndicate game, so to speak. I’d keep my eyes on Cartel for that, maybe EA will let Paradox rebrand that as well, who knows?
Either way, don’t think of it as the next big game in the series, it’s more a small look into other aspects of the universe.
5 1/2 hours? Really? If you’re trying to add philosophy to a game that isn’t exactly an impressive amount of time.
Why would they slap the Syndicate name on this generic futuristic FPS? WHY?
i guess i won’t be buying this game then. i desperatly hoping for the best since i enjoyed the old Syndicate immensly.
i’ll be putting my hopes for nostalgia on the new X-Com enemy unknown game that should arrive this year.
But if someone doesn’t spoon-feed me the info that the syndicates are bad, how will I learn the moral of the story?
Interesting, this is one of the lowest reviews I’ve currently run into yet on this game so far.
Still might important the game (or at least get it gifted on Steam), but sadly can’t just buy the game in store. Thanks OFLC RCíng this game.
I don’t want it to come across as “low” – our rating system is, by design, used to accomodate a wider range of scoring. The 5 doesn’t mean that it’s incredibly bad – it’s certainly a well designed, playable game. It just comes across as forgettable and average.
Invent or adopt generic cyberpunk universe.
Insert mute, generic hero.
Corporate control bad/Pretense of free thought good.
Shake.
Serve.
Pray nobody notices the hypocrisy in its messages of free thought while leading the player to a predetermined “good” outcome, removing all ability for them to decide on their own.
Profit.
Oh I am well aware that a five here means middle of the road when it comes to a score (or what some try to make the new 8). It means while you can sit back and enjoy the game, it doesn’t do too much to break things out of what it was, where ir wants to take things, or can’t even be too bothered to escape the “ME TOO!” views it gives off against it’s competors, in this case DE:HR. Things like that mean I’ll often hold up on getting a game until the desire to play something of that type gets just a little too much, or it’s cheap enough (more so with any DLC thrown together).
It’s the MacDonalds of gaming in otherwords. It shows you what you want, and you find you end up getting what you want with a heavy feeling afterwards that you know you’re going to have to hit the gym later to work off.
As to the game, yeah I’m still likely to play the hell out of it when I feel the need to get it. More so since there is a good chance I might overlook some of the issues with the game you pointed out simply because it was RCéd over here. That, or because it’s banned makes me still very much interested in giving the game a go when I can.
In any event, thank you very much for the reply. Your reviews are always a joy to read. 
First, thank you for the compliment.
Second, I do feel that Syndicate should be played at a moments notice when it becomes available for a dollar value that doesn’t disguise its great-production-values/massive-overpricing ratio.
Don’t EVER BRING THE PREDECESSORS INTO IT.
If you can do that, it’s a quick blast of a good concept, badly delivered as a “full game.”
Good review, personally I’d rate it higher because I found the gameplay to be really engaging and inventive throughout, the fact that I didn’t just have to point and shoot at enemies made it a lot more engaging plus that once you got used to “hacking” it became second nature and the fact that you could do it while shooting and moving around just added a new layer of awesomeness to it.
The biggest failing is without a doubt the writing, though. It’s cliché and the story is horribly easy to predict. I can definitely tell it takes place in a Syndicate universe, the themes and ideas are still present since the Bullfrog days, but they’re hardly at the forefront and whenever they feel relevant it’s for such a brief period of time that it feels fleeting at best.
I also question humanizing the agents for the sake of a story. That was the whole point of Syndicate’s agents, they weren’t people anymore. They were investments, the more tech you put in them the more you wanted to keep them safe. Not because you cared but because they represented a lot of money. In a way, they were tools of mass destruction. Playing from the view of an Agent should be boring, they are basically mindless weapons that are controlled by someone else. I was really hoping that that was what they were building for in the story but… yeah, way too cliché.
Still, I’d rate it a little higher than 5/10, I enjoyed playing it even if the length pissed me off and it’s probably the best FPS I’ve played in a long, long time.
I make it the 5/10 because of what it does to its own distinguishing features. The fact that, in order to rachet up the difficulty instead of doing something creative or interesting, they decide to make it so that you can’t USE your special abilities, they’re automatically reducing the gameplay to a regular shooter. It doesn’t matter that you have a couple of extra, superhuman abilities – This guy, or that guy are immune to them all. So eventually it dispenses with what makes itself special, and turns into a shooter because the things that you can do to the every day grunt are too good to exploit the ‘tough’ bad guys.
You can’t throw cool abilities in the player’s arsenal and then decide that they unbalance the game and expect me to think that’s a great way to extend the play time. They pretty much TURN their game into a par for the course, run of the mill, average shooter, with the added ‘bonus’ of hacking, which took so little time or effort, it may as well not have been there at all.
I didn’t really feel that those enemies were common enough to actually hamper the gameplay that much and even then I thought they were so quickly dispatched that it wasn’t really a concern but to each their own, you had a different experience than me.
Also, I haven’t played it multiplayer so I don’t know if they’re more common there or something, I’m just talking about the campaign.
Towards the end of the game I was racking up so many kills in quick succession that I could power Suicide and Persuade almost infinitely ironically enough thanks to them so if they hadn’t had these guys who block your abilities every now and then, I probably would’ve been done with the game a lot sooner than I was (6 hour campaign was such a major letdown, especially since the original game lasted sooo much longer).
I knew enemies and bosses that wouldn’t be affected by my abilities were inevitable so maybe that’s what softened the blow as well. By the time you run into the first guy, I was pretty much asking myself “Huh, strange that I haven’t run into… oh, there he is.”
Good wordplay at the start.
From what I’ve seen, this game was indeed shareholder appeasement with little regard for the original game, outside of concept. The fact that I only heard about it last year in October, sans any true details on gameplay, was an early sign.
Given that this was Starbreeze’ work, I’m rather saddened as well. They developed The Darkness, which was excellent, as well as Enclave and both Riddick games. Here’s hoping their next project goes better.
I heard about this game years ago and so did most people with a vested interest in Syndicate. As someone said, think it was someone at Paradox, “[Project RedLime] is the worst kept secret in the Swedish game industry, I’m glad they finally revealed it”. Everybody knew they were working on Syndicate.
One of the coolest bars in gaming also happens to be one of the most interesting.
While this gamne has been banned in my country, there are still many different ways to get hold of this one.
Ah the Grey Market, how we love you so.
“they managed to do all this without necessarily making you the bad guy, because if you’re not the one brainwashing the people, your competitors are.”
All that means is that you’re not the only bad guy.
What’s interesting is that an organization that runs on political power by definition cannot be a corporation; it’s called a gang, a “competing government,” etc.
So really, it seems that the game hasn’t advanced in terms on getting its morals, not to mention political definitions, correct.
“All that means is that you’re not the only bad guy.”
You certainly have a point there, but what concerns me in the trailer is the alarmist tone about EuroCorp controlling people through the dart chip. The very idea of a rogue agent or rogue group in the original games was a non-issue. Control was the ONLY thing you had, and there was no free-thinking, emotionally/morally based set of choices. It was a very bottom-line centred game, with very little proselytizing about the philosophical ramifications of corporate or governmental control. It just sort of handed you the reins and said, “win.”
I worry that “Agent Kilo” is going to grow a conscience and start to work against EuroCorp. I don’t mind moral awakenings in a game where they belong, I just don’t think they belong in a Syndicate game. That said, it still isn’t clear if that’s the case, but listening to Rosario Dawson’s dialogue about “I can use you any way I want to, but so can others,” or the bit at the beginning where she explains “I never wanted this. I wanted to use the chip to try to change the syndicates… to make them more human, but I was kidding myself.” It’s lines of dialogue like that, that have me worried.