Syndicate Co-op Hands-on

Developer: Starbreeze / Publisher: Electronic Arts / Platform: Xbox 360, PC, PS3 / Release Date: 24 February, 2012 / ESRB: Mature

GET YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF MY CORPORATE ASSETS

Remember Syndicate, the classic 1993 real-time, isometric action-strategy game from Bullfrog, with its drone’s-eye, fixed-view UI that gave you such a smug sense of tactically dominating all that you surveyed? All that top-down goodness fixed firmly in the crosshairs of your nerdstalgia? Yeah, well, forget all of that: Syndicate‘s newest incarnation plunks you down in the dirty, dangerous business of corporate extraction, FPS-style. We got our murderous megacorporate mitts on the game’s co-op multiplayer mode on a number of maps, only one of which—the Western Europe Mission, the same one shown in the consumer demo—we’re allowed to discuss at the moment. We could tell you about two others, of course, but, well, you know how that old saw goes…

For the uninitiated, Syndicate posits all the reliable cyberpunk tropes of megacorporate warfare; espionage, sabotage raids, vertical-insertion skirmishes, HVT extraction—y’know, the classics. Reflecting the notion that you and your three teammates have implanted biochips that allow the sharing of tactical information, augmented perception, and other cyberpunktual whoozits, the new first-person shooter treatment sports an energetic if slightly, erm, busy first-person UI (presumably this hailstorm of visual input can be tweaked to your personal tastes). Holo-overlays, Current Objective displays, digitally boosted views of brightly highlighted enemy combatants—it’s a bit of a visual barrage to take in initially, particularly when you’re dropped cold into your very first cooperative multiplayer session without the benefit of a single minute of single-player mode orientation. You quickly adapt to the multiplayer subtleties of mutual support, morphing tactical objectives, and the game’s so-named ‘Breaching’ capabilities…or you die. Actually, scratch that—you die a couple of times first, and then you adapt.

This Breaching is an essential concept around which much of Syndicate‘s new incarnation revolves. It’s a showy technological hand-wave that really forces teammates to cooperate to get the best of their foes, at least from what we experienced. Some of the special mid-boss soldiers/enemies arrayed against you can be right bastards to take down, as they start out not only insanely gunned-up, but further shielded by special physical (and in some cases, digital) armor and other protections that must be—you guessed it—Breached before your traditional slug-throwers can really inflict damage on them.

In practical terms, this often translated to two, three, or all four team-members concertedly wailing on said enemy until his unique defenses could be ‘Breached’, thus allowing more traditional violence to get through. Once that happens somebody on your side finally gets to walk up to the now-downed foe…and wrench his bio-chip right out of his no-longer-nearly-quite-so-annoying mortal coil. Pretty satisfying, that.

One special biochip ability that instantly becomes a cooperative team favorite—unless you’re playing with those who’d shoot the food in Gauntlet if they couldn’t get to it first—is the ability to remotely heal any team member who is both in your eyesight and within a modest range; just hold down one of the shoulder buttons and you’ll see his/her health increasing in real time.

When your team is initially, cautiously leap-frogging its collective carcass toward an objective or through some light enemy fringe resistance, it’s not much more than a neato app to encourage mutual support. But once combat gets serious it assumes paramount importance to the completion of the mission at hand—once any given team-member takes enough damage, his/her physical-electronic combat gear simply shuts down right there, leaving him/her able to do little more than stagger about and bellow for help. No handy respawning in this corporate future.

Let one of your team members get to that stage, and some other member of your squad will need to go to them…and then just kind of loiter in their vicinity, taking precious seconds to bring the fallen comrade back online, back into the fray. It sounds easy enough in theory, but it’s quite another when you’ve got a seemingly impervious-to-bullets enemy squad leader relentlessly pursuing you around corners and attempting to give you a plasma enema. Further, the ‘no respawn’ scheme means that, in the heat of a particularly frantic battle, it’s not only possible but likely that a team member who has become separated (or has temporarily attempted to go rogue and/or Rambo somewhere) may meet his downfall in such an isolated, inconvenient spot that even finding the guy to revive him can throw a potential screw into the overall tactical pooch. So, well, don’t let that happen, either.

All this said, Syndicate‘s multiplayer provides admirable, massive, constant and viscerally tangible incentive to work together. In one mission, our team was tasked with getting hold of suitcase-sized modules of data, sometimes two per team-member, and schlepping them back to the extraction vehicle. Problem: The damned things require at least one hand to carry them, so while you’re doing so you’re limited to wielding a single handgun, and that at an awkward, vulnerable pace (Bonus: You’re probably going to have to make two or more trips like this). In such instances, it often helps to have one of your guys keep both hands free to protect you with a heavy, two-handed assault weapon as you lumber to the vehicle to stash the liberated corporate property. Gets tense, let me tell you.

Syndicate is slated for release in February 2012; stay tuned to this frequency for full review intel.

SHARE THIS POST WITH YOUR IDIOT FRIENDS: