Syndicate Demo Gets Things Right
Posted: 2012-02-05 07:45pm
Well, putting aside the EA servers sucking and the demo hard-crashing on a semi-regular basis.
The art design is great - the world is cyberfuture, but the augmented-reality style UI is pure 90s. They use the high level of body awareness to sell the mass of your cyberman, and the UI sway is nowhere near as distracting as it appears in videos. The information is presented in such a way as it is immediately obvious what is going on at all times.
The reward system is solid, and superior to other games like BF3. All that matters is what your team does (to get unlock tokens) and what you do (to get points). Kills are irrelevant, what weapons use are using is irrelevant, only how much you help the team counts. You steal miniboss brain-chips to buy blueprints for upgrades, and then score points to 'progress' the 'research'. It is JUST LIKE SYNDICATE LOL, while not forcing you to use things you don't want or play a way you don't want to.
The teamplay stuff is super-solid. There are plenty of apps that help your squad (I take shield, which provides everyone with ablative damage reduction) and the user is rewarded for everything people do with them - with shield, I score points as it is blown off protecting my allies, which encourages me to use it when it is most needed. The 'special' enemies require teamwork and intelligent applciaiton of your breaches to kill easily - to the point where Sherry and I can do it faster than four people who mill at random.
The weapon breakdown (the limited selection in the demo) is archetypical but interesting. You get a primary and a pistol, and the primaries include a shotgun and a range of rifles from low dam/high rof to a battle rifle, with their own upgrades which include outrageous flavour text (like microscoping capacitors giving bullets knockback). The upgrades aren't tiered so you can choose the ones you want, and you don't need ot be using the gun in question to finish the research. The belt-fed shotgun (only available as a pickup in the demo) can be upgraded to a 10ga, double-barrel belt-fed shotgun controlled by mindchips, which is pretty funny shit.
The perks (or skill tree) has a bunch of different appraoches, mainly apps, health and gunplay. I imagine you get enough skill points at max level to buy all of them, which is a bit sad, but as you level up you get a lot of scope to make your dude distinct. The four coop guys are just skins adn don't affect your loadout at all.
In all its a really good coop experience, to the point that I know 8 people who are happy to just play the one level given. It uses a map from Sydnicate '93 for coop missions, which allows my tiny optimistic soul to hope they have DLC coop missions on the way, however unlikely that might be.
The art design is great - the world is cyberfuture, but the augmented-reality style UI is pure 90s. They use the high level of body awareness to sell the mass of your cyberman, and the UI sway is nowhere near as distracting as it appears in videos. The information is presented in such a way as it is immediately obvious what is going on at all times.
The reward system is solid, and superior to other games like BF3. All that matters is what your team does (to get unlock tokens) and what you do (to get points). Kills are irrelevant, what weapons use are using is irrelevant, only how much you help the team counts. You steal miniboss brain-chips to buy blueprints for upgrades, and then score points to 'progress' the 'research'. It is JUST LIKE SYNDICATE LOL, while not forcing you to use things you don't want or play a way you don't want to.
The teamplay stuff is super-solid. There are plenty of apps that help your squad (I take shield, which provides everyone with ablative damage reduction) and the user is rewarded for everything people do with them - with shield, I score points as it is blown off protecting my allies, which encourages me to use it when it is most needed. The 'special' enemies require teamwork and intelligent applciaiton of your breaches to kill easily - to the point where Sherry and I can do it faster than four people who mill at random.
The weapon breakdown (the limited selection in the demo) is archetypical but interesting. You get a primary and a pistol, and the primaries include a shotgun and a range of rifles from low dam/high rof to a battle rifle, with their own upgrades which include outrageous flavour text (like microscoping capacitors giving bullets knockback). The upgrades aren't tiered so you can choose the ones you want, and you don't need ot be using the gun in question to finish the research. The belt-fed shotgun (only available as a pickup in the demo) can be upgraded to a 10ga, double-barrel belt-fed shotgun controlled by mindchips, which is pretty funny shit.
The perks (or skill tree) has a bunch of different appraoches, mainly apps, health and gunplay. I imagine you get enough skill points at max level to buy all of them, which is a bit sad, but as you level up you get a lot of scope to make your dude distinct. The four coop guys are just skins adn don't affect your loadout at all.
In all its a really good coop experience, to the point that I know 8 people who are happy to just play the one level given. It uses a map from Sydnicate '93 for coop missions, which allows my tiny optimistic soul to hope they have DLC coop missions on the way, however unlikely that might be.
To educate you, unlike tiresome single player RPGs that require padding in the form of trivial minigames to extend playtime or restrict player movement, faster or multi games require players to juggle multiple resources instead. Everyone I've played with thinks the combination of range limitations, breach speeds and adrenaline system works great, despite not requiring you to swivel left stick while in a gun fight; indeed, hacking things without looking while running/jumping/fighting is core to the flow of the game.