Be Excellent To Each Other

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Yes, that Bullfrog game. Now a first person shooter (did you expect anything else), but do we really need this after Deus Ex? Starbreeze do 'do' an awesome shooter though.

Hang on, February? Not too long to find out then.

All the things they could have done with this.. and they make it an FPS.

Good looking trailer, though. I like the Persuadertron stuff.

Yeah, that could be great as long as it's not "Here are the 2 heavily scripted points where you use the persuadertron" etc.

It looks pretty awful to me. But then I hate FPS games.

Co-op/multiplayer demo online now kids. To the downloadatron!

Interesting, will try it tomorrow. It looks like a cyberpunk version of the Battlefield 3 singleplayer campaign

PRESS X TO USE PERSUADERTRON.

That trailer does make it look quite exciting, even though I watched it with the sound muted. I really enjoyed the Syndicate setting and theme back on the Amiga and PC, so I'll probably get this at some point. It's a shame they didn't do something other than an FPS as there are already a ton of those.

Bland.

It's the only word I think that describes it. It's co-op is like Left for Dead but instead of zombies think tired old soldiers in crash helmets. Instead of the spooky city settings think muted grey walkways and large grey walls. There's compounds! There's corridors! It's empty! There's barrels! There's gun turrets! There's... who cares, because it's everything that lazy post-future Bladerunner-esq inspired developers can bash out without thought.

It's Left for Dead with all the personality sucked dry.

I've thought of another, it's sterile.

The one good thing that it's got going for it are the guns which sound good, hit stuff when you point the trigger and all the things that every game with a gun in it should feel like since MW set the standard. Bit of feedback, non-intrusive onscreen indicator, dudududu noise. Very nice. Even a Dead Space floating gun indicator which I liked.

But who gives a fuck if you're going from an area that looks like a future prison yard to another shooting reems of identical looking soldiers. Oh, here's one with a large chain gun who's the boss. What a fucking surprise.

STOP RUINING MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF AWESOME GAMES YOU FUCKING CUNTS.

HELP, MY SYSTEMS ARE DOWN!

Oh my god, it sucks.

NEED A REBOOT OVER HERE!

It's like an even more tedious version of Brink, or Left4Dead.

I'M GETTING A BONER FROM ALL THIS KILLING, BUT THEN, I'M A PSYCHOPATH.

The whole game is based around getting within range of things and holding down LB until something happens. In between all that you have dreary, forgettable shooting with weak-feeling weapons against a horde of identikit soldiers in a concrete factory or something.

NEED A REBOOT OVER HERE!

Everything seems based on LB. You open doors with LB, you heal your friends with LB, you resurrect your friends (who stumble around saying the same line until you do so) with LB. LB. That's all. Press LB to win game. When the big boss baddie appears, he's immune to damage in big orange letters until you run within LBing range and LB him until he's no longer immune. Meanwhile Sgt. Rongo turns up and you get 243 more 'points' for killing him. Then press LB to heal your friend.

DID YOU SEE THAT HEADSHOT?

I remember the Western Europe mission in the first Syndicate game. Here's a video if you don't. The music is tense, and you can avoid all those guards as you suddenly burst into the Colonel's office and take him out. Then, jump into a car and make your escape. Here, you make the noisiest most obvious assault possible on an entrenched foe and wear them down by the sheer fact that you can't die so long as your friends push LB.

HELP! MY SYSTEMS ARE DOWN.

When you 'die', you just sort of stagger around a bit. The enemies dance around you, their AI unsure of what to do, but you're invulnerable. There's no danger so long as one of you is alive, no risk of being locked in a room further ahead and leaving your team short as in Left4Shit, no precious medical kits to run out of, so long as your real-life LB button holds out. Enemies charge suicidally around corners and try to attack you at point blank range. Your assorted guns burp muted death and jiggle around the screen in the same annoying fashion as Battlefield 3.

NEED TO REBOOT MY SYSTEMS!

This isn't Syndicate. Syndicate plonked your agents down somewhere in the city. Somewhere else was a target, be it an item or a person, possibly guarded by guards, perhaps even by enemy agents[1]. Look at the city. How would you like to get in? How many agents will you send? One to lure the target out into range of a sniper? Just walk in, plant a bomb and walk back out? A full-on assault? Walk up to them and pop them once in the face with the pistol? Now, how to get back out? Have a car full of agents around the block? You could drive-by the target if you wanted. Or wait until they tried to escape in their own car and gauss gun it into bits. Did it work out? Why not play again, there's other approaches you could try. Come back later on, when you've researched more weapons.

In new Syndicate, you LB until their invincible shield turns off and then shoot them. Nothing else works. That would be too complicated, precious wallets. Please deposit £39.99 to see more. The irony of Eurocorp literally turning its citizens into sheeple and EA's cynicism here.

HELP! MY SYSTEMS ARE DOWN

These are the missions 'inspired' by the original game? The ones that Penney Arcaed found so difficult at first? They're just attrition. One of you can just hang back and hold LB to heal anyone who gets 'killed'. There's nothing else to it. Before you've even finished it the first time you'll be bored, when you do reach the end you can't believe that was it... the boss looked only slightly different from his minions, and just had that bigger gun and that invincibility field to make him stand out.

Will the singleplayer be more stimulating? Will it fuck. This is EA. It'll be chock full of heavily scripted sequences, a few moments of bullet time, and lots of sit n' watch canned takedowns. Look at the trailer. It's a slightly greyer Battlefield 3.

They've thrown ranks in. Unlocks. The original Syndicate (depressingly nearly two DECADES old) was unique in that you could choose to spend your money on which type of weapon you wanted next. Now it's just a stupid barrier to force you into grinding the same shit over and over again, not because you're interested to try another approach (there aren't any) but to stop you trading the game in to those retailers they've almost succeeded in driving out of business, once you realize how shallow it is. Will we even be allowed to drive cars? Will there be multiple agents to direct in singleplayer, or are we doomed to forever be Miles "Fucking" Kilo only? Why am I asking? It's a modern FPS, by EA no less, I should be grateful if you even get a single NPC with a 'follow' and 'wait' toggle.

Nothing about this game is interesting or intriguing. The cyberpunky world doesn't look believable like in Mindjack[2], the weapons are like spud guns, the whole thing is based around making hacking a 'do everything' button and the combat isn't exciting. No doubt in singleplayer you'll have an Asian woman directing you via your headset, and you'll get to hold LB to *persuade* a guard to shoot his friends or open a gate or just plain stop breathing, but this isn't what games were meant to become 20 years ago.

[1]There'd be an invariable rush of enemy agents in the first few minutes of each mission, but this was irrelevant once you had the flamethrower as you could just barbecue them through walls, rendering them little more than a formality. If you were bored, and it was a later mission, you could use your miniguns instead as they'd all have bombs and you could create an amusing field of beeping death across the entire plaza of the city centre, waiting for one 'stray' bullet or indeed the time to run out to create a screen-filling chain reaction.

[2]Mindjack, for all its flaws, at least presented a cool looking futuristic world. The opening futuristic airport levels were nice to look at, and the bright, clean Mirror's Edge-style city you saw a lot of later on brought back happy memories of innumerable Saturday morning cartoons and anime, especially with big stompy police robots. New Syndicate, by contrast, is some proto-Matrix bullshit.