Syndicate

I turned on the Quick Look of Syndicate expecting a thoroughly middling “post-modern” FPS with a black-and-gold aesthetic ripped straight from the re-launched Deus Ex; watching it only for a personal bemusement with EA’s marketing team’s strange proclivity to use the phrase “corporate espionage” every now and then. So, I returned to my daily tasks, letting Jeff’s dulcet tones flow in-and-out of my ears, as they are want to do. The usual hail of bullets, bass fades, and whirr of digital screens popping in and out filled the rest of my aural nether, occasionally allowing myself a glance at the ensuing melee to satisfy my conceptions that this game is exactly what I thought it would be.

A strange and muffled word crossed through my headphone’s wires then. It was muttered, I should say, with a rather strange sincerity, quite contrary to my expectations of what I thought to be a rather story-poor venture into futuristic corporatism. The word was a simple one: Zaibatsu. I won’t bore you with an explanation so far as long as you accept that this was enough to have me rewind, sit back, and watch it all again with a renewed interest.

So I watched the blues, blacks, and golds streak across the screen. I found a particular twinge of excitement at the promise of what seemed to be an abnormally high-paced trudge through corridors and hallways that are treated nowadays with far too much caution and obvious foreshadowing. Simultaneous (and seamless) hacking, alongside the requisite slow-motion overlay registered as smaller blips on my already overborne hype-producing-engine; but seemed all the same, for lack of a better word, rather neat.

I should say that I had not played a true “shooter” that I’ve enjoyed since BioShock, and had the feeling that it was high time to indulge in what seemed to be a genuinely interesting new game in the genre. Especially after my last venture in the world of shiny new $60+ games ended with a glorified expansion pack now known only as Revelations.

Home with box in hand, my mind wrestled with a fearsome bout of buyer’s remorse that was want to scream and tear at what it termed a particularly foolish waste of cash. The screaming beast was kept at bay with the promise of a new interactive tale of corporate extrusion, intrusion, information fondling, and sublime, persistent structure.

Perhaps 10 to 15 hours later, and the beast had been slaughtered, skinned, and served at last bell. I had chewed upon its heart and spit out its eyes, for it had raged at something so particularly unique and new in a time of over-saturated saturation that such remorse’s existence had not even the smallest of purposes.

Syndicate is not a perfect game. Nor is it a game that will likely be remembered much outside of the addiction to cash-grabbing re-boots that have defined the latter parts of this console generation. It is, however, a destroyer of preconceptions, a molester of stereotypes, and above all, a harbinger of fun in a genre mostly drained of it.

Let me start with the immediate and incorruptible heart of its lusciously structured chaos: the pacing. Syndicate races through combat with a mix of the rambunctious sliding of early Doom and the deliberate shooting of Modern Warfare. It takes an abbreviated arsenal from the first Deus Ex, dumbs it all down a notch, and then unleashes it upon a world full of much more rust, blood, and copper. When you’re slow-motion-rocketing in between spots of minimal cover while hacking an incoming missile, firing at one of the seven annoyingly deadly guns pointed at your body, and awaiting the subtle ping that marks the recharge of a power meant only to explode men’s heads from their body, it feels, for the sake of unfair comparison, much like a jaw-dropping game of first-person pinball.

Put another way, Syndicate’s charm lies in that it never lets you breathe. Of course there are breaks in the action, and some rather cheesy attempts at first-person cinematic interludes; but there is never a moment when you are encouraged to just waste brass to the floor or turn your D.A.R.T. into a melting glob of wasted silicon (well… you’ll see). Firefights never come across as overbearing or even the remotest bit droll, but as a delightful return to the feeling that you are required to do all things at all times in order to ensure your survival. To actually play the game, and succeed in turn, you are forced to suss out every little piece of design that has been provided to you. You must, for once in this genre, play the game to play the game.

How Starbreeze has accomplished this though, I feel, is actually fairly simple: they haven’t tried to do much of anything new. The AI is far from amazing, no event is random in the least, and no truly new concepts are introduced to keep you distracted from the fight at hand. They haven’t so much tried to change the gameplay formula as they have tried to make it more of what you expect a hectic shootout to feel like.

The story is not particularly remarkable. Predictable, even. Told through barely interactive first-person cutscenes, it’s fleshed out through codex entries and walls of text that I doubt even the most ardent science-fiction fan will have fun reading all of. It speaks of the usual highly successful lackey of the gigantic corporation: naïve, skilled, and seemingly admired by all around him. Miles Kilo is the generic name of your generic protagonist; made special through his slightly more advanced implanted chipset and peculiar silence. It tells of a corporation’s trust, betrayal, and eventual attempt to reconcile with Kilo’s being greater than they, and has overarching themes railing against corporate greed, consumer societies, and group thinking. Syndicate is the complete cyberpunk shooter package for the clamoring consumer.

Within this particularly boring narrative structure, however, Starbreeze has included an atmosphere that can claim few rivals. Alongside the expected Deus Ex rust, copper, and gold lies a grime of rebellion and stark plastic perfectionism. Skyscrapers lie as vertical monoliths that challenge Kilo to attempt an infiltration of their blue and black ducts before having to be wrenched back into a sky of a ruddy golden rust or thrown into a spectacular Jobsian white. It is easy indeed to forget in looking around EuroCorp’s headquarters that there is no advertisement for a new Helvetica’d i-something-or-other plastered across its walls.

As if there was little else to feel, the player is able to experience the world of Syndicate like so few games now allow. It lies creeping with tension and a populace’s barely held sanity, and relishes in a glow of constant consumer stimulation enforced by the ever-marching corporate armies and their never-ending search for market share. Even supposed revolutionaries crumple to the corporations’ wishes, having strapped themselves with jury-rigged D.A.R.T.s or being forced to tap into a corporation’s resources to ensure that weapons and products flow into the “right” hands.

This amazing atmosphere allows one to quite easily forget Syndicate’s generic ills during Kilo’s romp through his predictable revolution. Yet, should you find yourself willing to do so, I guarantee that you will find it quite hard to forget the red neon glare of the Chinese sun, the slapdash Blade Runner-esque Tokyotown in the middle of New York’s decrepit slums, and the stark blue-white glare of EuroCorp’s monolithic headquarters.

Don’t fret, for I have not forgotten the multiplayer. To indulge Dos Equis’ marketing dollars: I don’t play online multiplayer much, but when I do, I play co-op. So, I came in to the mode having rather unrealistically high hopes of seamless connectivity and full-featured “corporations”/guilds to hedge up its community. I was met, however (when it decided to work), with a slew of connectivity errors and certain maps stuck on repeat in rotation. The matches I were able to play I grew to like just as much, if not more than, the single player experience for their arcade-like pace and presentation, and the wonderfully fulfilling upgrade and modification mechanics. Connectivity issues and other strange technical glitches with the experience, however, forced my hand in deciding that the co-op is much more a mere exercise in frustration than frantic non-competitive fun.

Syndicate is a game to be enjoyed not for what it claims to bring, but for what it is: a fast, pulsing, and oh-so-deliciously dirty romp through genre conventions. It flows rather than presents, doesn’t risk innovation where it needn’t, and allows one to fulfill a sorely missed hole in the modern-day gaming diet. While it will never fall on the side of a classic, it is a game that deserves to be played, and one from which many other more generic AAA titles should certainly learn.