Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

I just want to say that EA's Starbreeze's Syndicate was shockingly good, by if you can tolerate 2012-era FPSes. 12/17/2016, 2:46am PST Syndicate did a couple of things that set it apart for me. The first was the hacking, which used a golf swing-type metre, similar to reloading in Gears of War. Put your crosshairs on something and press the right bumper to start the hack, then either hold it until a bar fills all the way up to hack it normally, or release the bumper when its in the power band to fucking hack the shit out of it. And EVERYTHING in the future corporate actual battlefield can be hacked - bulletproof enemies to shut down their armor, cloaked enemies to reveal them, land mines and incoming grenades to deactivate them, missiles to send them back at their launchers, drones and autoturrets to change their allegiance, maybe one or two other things (the future is kind of spartan, you played Mirror's Edge). The overall effect is like whack-a-mole with a mallet in one hand and a magnum in the other - way more fun than shooting row after row of ducks with a pellet gun in Call of Duty, or filling a clown's mouth with water in Gears of War. The second thing Syndicate did right was sound design. Every gun sounds like a fucking cannon, which is appropriate because they hit like one too (the game uses an evolution of the gore tech from Riddick and the Darkness, cranked up to classic cyberpunk levels - the first time I sawed someone in half with the minigun, I finally understood where worm was coming from his whole life). There's this sequence where you're slowly descending into a dance club in a transparent glass elevator, and as the music gets louder you can see a SWAT team rushing in from the other entrance, scattering citizens and kicking over cover (this is F.E.A.R.-calibre encounter design, right down to starting you off in a vantage point from which to formulate a strategy), then as the doors to your elevator open the beat drops and suddenly you are living your teenage trenchcoat columbine fantasy in a smokey pink haze to a mix of inappropriately upbeat Swedish J-Pop and panicked police radio chatter. It's bad ass, like everything that comes out of your speakers in Syndicate. Did I mention your partner is voiced by Michael Wincott? I'm pretty much buying games just to hear him talk at this point.

I know a lot of people here don't like Bioware games anyway by jeep 05/15/2012, 2:10pm PDT     Re: I know a lot of people here don't like Bioware games anyway by Ice Cream Jonsey 05/16/2012, 12:09pm PDT     jeep was pretty prescient here. NT by John Gulp 12/16/2016, 11:03pm PST     I just want to say that EA's Starbreeze's Syndicate was shockingly good, by if you can tolerate 2012-era FPSes. 12/17/2016, 2:46am PST         It was a generic, shitty, two weapon, cover shooter clone with a shit story. NT by bullshit. 01/06/2017, 12:37pm PST             It's very high quality and not remotely a cover shooter, but the rest is spot on NT by Decoding '2012-era FPS' 01/06/2017, 1:45pm PST                 I bought this on your recommendation but I haven't played it yet. by Worm 01/07/2017, 12:59am PST                     Play on hard. Don't give up on the first boss, nothing else is as bad as he is. by The train boss is actually fun! 01/07/2017, 2:09am PST                         I really like it so far, the missile boss sucked by Worm 05/21/2017, 8:13pm PDT                             They frame it as a moral conundrum. by Vaneza 05/23/2017, 6:12pm PDT