Sydicate Demo Drops (Thoughts on that.)

Despite the cries of blasphemy at the thought of turning an all-time great strategy game into a balls out first person shooter, there is something undeniably appealing about Starbreeze's upcoming remake/sequel/adaptation/whatever of Syndicate. With it's gun-laden tale of futuristic corporate espionage, Starbreeze's Syndicate looks a little like Deus Ex: Human Revolution for stupid people, but add in some crazy weapons and mind-hackingly cool augmentations, along with the involvement of Starbreeze, whose Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness were both criminally under-appreciated, and you've got a stew going.

A co-op demo drops on Xbox Live and PSN today. Hit the jump for a trailer, and later, some thoughts on the demo.







Aword of advice I can offer about Syndicate: Try not to think about the fact that EA is publishing a game about evil corporations, it will make you sad.

Moving on. The first thing I noticed when I booted up the Syndicate demo was that something was wrong with my TV. Why was the resolution so low? Why did the text look so funny? The PS3 dashboard had looked fine seconds ago. Fear not, loyal reader, nothing was wrong with my TV. It was just some terrible typeface selection. Not terrible, really. The menus look sufficiently sci-fi, but the digitalization and pixelation effects applied to the text makes it look as if it was upconverted from 480p.

Nitpicks aside, Sydicatate's menu drops you directly into the co-op matchmaking lobby, where you have access to standard multiplayer features edit your class and view potential upgrades. While the features are the same as you'd see in any other online shooter, they are dressed up with some nice narative touches.

The myriad of upgrades to both weapons and "apps" (the woefully misguided renaming of Call of Duty's perks) are fleshed out with detailed, in-canon descriptions. Sure, it'd probably be easier to say: Assault rifle: shoots things. Scope upgrade: Shoots things better, but it's cool to have a detailed history of a fictional weapons' manufacturing data, or read the specifics of exactly how upgrading a chip in your brain increases your reload speed. It shows the thought that developer Starbreeze has put into what could have been a tacked-on feature.

Once you choose your loadouts and perks "apps" (a name I refuse to write without sarcastic quotation marks), you're dropped into a four player co-op mission that tasks you with shooting everyone in front of you who doesn't have a word like xXbuttmunchKINGXx hovering above their head. The game's futuristic setting, which will hopefully have more importance in the single player campaign, is merely set dressing here. The apparent "Corporate Warfare" that is taking place sure sounds a lot like regular warfare.

Again, hopefully, the corporate espionage will be given more credence in the single player --and from the released gameplay snippets, that does seem to be the case-- because in online co-op, it's little more than a case of switching "country" or "faction" with "corporation." You're still just working your way through footsoldiers, occasionally encountering their slightly more powerful commanding officers, who apparently don't even merit cool corporatationy analogues to traditional military ranks. I mean, they felt the need to change hacking to breaching, but the guy with the extra-large assault rifle is still a Sergeant?

Speaking of "breaching," the game's big hook is "breaching," which is to say, hacking. As this is a cyberpunky future, everyone in the game comes standard with all sorts of fancy neural implants, which player characters can pretty freely hack, excuse me, "breach" for varying reasons.

It's all very easy to do, just slam down the breach button, and breach away. Certain boss characters that have impenetrable shields that can only be lowered by breaching. The feature is also used to psychically heal teammates from a distance, or to "reboot" (revive) them, should they wander into the paths of too many bullets; something that will happen with the wonderful partners you'll have in random matchmaking games. Breaching is actually a pretty streamlined feature that works well within the fast-paced gunplay.

Man, this game looks EXACTLY like Human Revolution.

As there is little more to the demo than shootin' dudes, it is fortunate that the gunplay is excellent. Sydicate sports some of the smoothest shooting mechanics of the generation, combing the twitchy iron sights of Call of Duty with the physicality of Mirror's Edge. The physicality should come as no surprise to anyone who has played either Escape from Butcher Bay or The Darkness, as Starbreeze has always handled character presence in first person exceptionally well. The snappy shooting is a bit of a surprise though, as the aforementioned Starbreeze shooters both featured manageably cumbersome aiming mechanics.

It's all balanced nicely by the breaching mechanic. With most non-shooting interactions done telepathically, the need for a prolonged "revive" or "button-push" first person animations is eliminated. This keeps the gameplay fast and furious. And fun. Above all, the game is just fun. It forces just the right amount of cooperation, while still giving each player the thrill of feeling like their leading the team. So while it's all rather mindless from a narrative standpoint, the game succeeds on the gameplay front.

Here's hoping the single player campaign can do both.