Preview: Syndicate

Do yourself a favour: If you’d usually set games to normal difficultly so you can rush through, play Syndicate’s co-op on Hard instead. Get three friends to join you. Communicate. Devise tactics. Think.

On my first run-through of the soon-to-be-released-properly demo I appreciated the existence of Syndicate’s more tactical systems, but didn’t see them as necessary since “shoot a guy” was already enough of a viable technique. Normal seemed like a perfectly fine way to play, but wasn’t nearly the optimal experience. Playing with a higher level of complication absolutely puts you more in line with the obvious original intention.

This mode’s a co-op assault. Your mission is to get to the boss and take him out. It’s not a fancy premise, but it’s in service of one of the most interesting campaigns I’ve played in a long while. It might have been down to the fact that, although Syndicate’s a dyed in the wool FPS, my teammates and I were liberally throwing around MMO terminology. Our attempts felt like we were running an Instance and were doing it from an entirely untraditional perspective.

Syndicate’s controls are like a traditional shooter, you’ve got access to genre mainstays like iron sights and sprinting, but on top of those you have the “breaching” ability. Breaching is a bit of a catch-all term because it turns the left bumper into a “do anything” button. Aim at your friends and hold it to heal them, aim at certain enemies and hold it to negate their armour, aim it at technology like planted turrets and you’ll deactivate them. If a teammate takes too much damage they need to be rebooted with a longer press of the button in closer proximity. The game’s balanced to take advantage of how reliant you are on your teammates, more people concentrating their breach in one place; the quicker the action’s performed.

But “Rezzing” and “debuffing” aren’t the only MMO-crossovers, the tactic for the boss at the end of the stage was, no joke, yo-yoing aggro between two players while others concentrated fire on the Add-spawns.

Let me remind you that this is an FPS.

We devised tactics like hanging back to pick off groups of less threatening enemies  and risking a character hanging out of cover by keeping their constantly waning health bar topped up with our breaches. Even when we devised specific tactics and coordinated successfully, we still could wipe if enemies didn’t react to us optimally. We needed the boss to travel in a specific direction so that we had adequate cover to hide behind while we waiting to recharge our health, but if he decided to go in an opposite route he’d take down our teammates dealing with other enemies. This AI variety meant that every time we wiped and returned to a checkpoint we’d have a completely different experience the next time around, which kept things interesting rather than frustrating us with the same pattern.

When you eventually complete the mission you’ve access to a diverse and compelling upgrade system. Each level you go up gives you a point to spend on a tech tree where you can unlock things like faster reloading, extra negation of more explosive damage and longer sprinting, but on top of improving your character you also earn tokens to spend on blueprints for your preferred weapons. When you buy a blueprint it unlocks a bar that fills as you gain more experience, these unlocks range from helping lessen recoil and giving you more magazine capacity.

This mode’s absolutely worth your attention and worth a try when the demo drops later in the week. I really hope that the single player is cut from the same cloth.

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Tags: EA, Gaming, Starbreeze, Syndicate