Syndicate (2012)

Syndicate is an appealing game that occasionally takes a page out of Deus Ex's playbook, but always remains true to its own style. There is no defilement of the original game's cult status whatsoever. Syndicate is a showpiece FPS in terms of gameplay and presentation.

A solid shooter that feels fresh and original on some points, and succesfully borrows from the best on others. It's not perfect, but it's a title that all shooter fans should take for a spin.

Syndicate leaves me cold at almost all levels. And where it will not let me cold, it repels me.

A game of thrills and missed opportunities. And so it's important to know what you want from this shooter before you commit. Come to it for the thrills of joining a team and mowing down gunners like so many weeds in a Colorado research facility. Come to it for a chilly vision of the future, where the minds of meddlers can be altered with a simple computer program. There are numerous games better at providing single-player satisfaction, however, and this is where Syndicate falters.

Oftentimes the redo reflects the exact standards and formulas of its new genre rather than marching boldly into new territory. Syndicate falls into this trap, telling a boring tale of swapping allegiances amidst flurries of gunfire.

Obviously, Syndicate does have the eye-candy factor, as well as interesting battle features, a large number of available weapons and palm-sweating moments of action. But its lack of personality betrays it, as does the completely predictable finale, the absence of remarkable opponents, the colorless locales and the lacking multiplayer mode. [April 2012]

Neither a disappointment nor euphoria – it's Syndicate, excellent multiplayer action game. Unfortunately, the whole single-player campaign feels like a five-hour tutorial. [March 2012]

The potential of both Syndicate as a franchise and Starbreeze as the developer was not fully used. The co-op mode and the video post-processing are great but the game as a whole is a disappointment. [April 2012, p.52]

It's the co-op missions that really give the game some replay value, and I suspect is the only part that is truly memorable.

It's too short, too small in many ways and way too conventional in a market oversaturated with AAA alternatives. Alternatives which last longer and offer competitive modes, not just a few dozen hours of co-op runs in which you can't point anything out to your teammates unless everyone has a microphone for the game's VoIP.

Syndicate is amazingly dull and thoughtless for a game where you can kill people with your brain.

An ok campaign with potentially great co-op marred by uninspired design, poor storytelling and glitches. [June 2012, p.76]

Syndicate's confused story gives way to passable shooting with a pointless layer of hacking mechanics. [May 2012, p.68]

A sloppy singleplayer that is pretending to be something it is not is being rescued by its entertaining cooperative multiplayer. Unfortunately, the co-op still needs much more content to be acknowledged as the fully fledged game.