Syndicate 2012 stems from Bullfrog
Productions’s 1993 isometric tactical shooter original. This SF first person
shooter reboot has some impressive contributors: award-winning SF and fantasy
writer Richard Morgan (Altered
Carbon)
wrote the storyline, while actor Brian Cox provides one of the voiceovers. As
SF, the game covers comparable cyberpunk bio-enhancement territory to Morgan’s
Takashi Kovacs novels. Game-wise, it means that the Dart bio-chip implant you
possess as Miles Kilo enables you to create a blanket digital scan of your
environment. It also provides you with hacking potential of a truly lethal
kind, enabling you to hijack enemies’ chips and take them out by using
Suicide, Backfire and Persuade abilities.
At first, you feel as though you’re
looking through the eyes of the Terminator, with a digital sensory overload of
white line-indicated malleable objects within your field of view and a world
awash with eye-dazzling glass and neon bling. But once the fighting begins, you
focus on simply trying to stay alive in a world ruled by mega-corporations
(like your own Eurocorp). With only part of the population embracing the chip
implant, the rest of the world have become second class citizens, to say the
least, worse off than surfing on dial-up. Agent Kilo’s business is corporate
espionage (‘Business is war’), which involves hacking into facilities and
fighting off security AI and tactical forces with a variety of gunmetal and
digital chip weaponry. An RPG element allows enhancements of skill sets, while
a four-player online co-op mode updates the original Syndicate shooter experience.
As an FPS, while no stand-out
classic, Syndicate has its fair share of adrenalin
rush firefights and gruesome enemy demises to dish out. Playing it on PC, while
the world is bleached by lighting to a predominantly blue hue, I suffered no
buggy nonsense, and the frosty heart of a world where human emotion has been
replaced by computer chips is atmospherically rendered. Story-wise, Kilo’s
backstory and the ongoing cross and double-cross intertwine effectively in
between all the blasting. The single player is no vast, sprawling masterpiece,
but it does throw in enough variety as it progresses to make you want to keep
moving forward in what is more a rampage through corporate glass mountains
than Mass
Effect 3 galaxy-zapping.
And you get a minigun, for
goodness sake!
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