SYNCH

SYNCH is a turn-based strategy game built on the Unreal Engine by a team of students from the Baylor University.

Despite what people might think, building a proper turn-based game is more challenging that you can imagine. The biggest problem is not the engine or the gameplay, but the balancing. Getting the right damage, protection, number of moves, and so on takes a lot of work. Even if one of these parameters is off, the entire gameplay falls apart.

When developers say that they built a turn-based game, we know that there is a good chance for the balancing to be done poorly, which in turn can ruin the entire experience. This is a genre that has all kinds of titles and things like graphics or proper level design doesn’t really matter. Unfortunately, SYNCH is a bad in every respect, despite the powerful engine that it’s used.

SYNCH in not a good game, by any measure. I simply can’t find any redeeming quality to it. It’s true that it’s been made more like an experiment by a group of developers from Baylor University, but that’s shouldn’t really be an excuse, especially since they have listed it on Steam Greenlight.

The only good thing I can find with SYNCH is that it’s free, and it won’t cost people any money to play it. The graphics are simply terrible, despite the advanced engine being used, the gameplay is atrocious with no rhyme of reason, the mouse doesn’t seem always to respond to commands, the artwork and design for the characters lacks in every aspect, and the audio is terrible as well.

The thing is that the team of students from the Baylor University can do better. They have another game listed, and it’s quite good, to say the least. This just could have been their start in gaming.

Just adding various units with the hope that it will be enough a turn-based strategy will not make, so if you’re looking for fun, you should be looking somewhere else and not in the direction of SYNCH.