14 DAY TRIAL // Syndicate delighted plenty of strategy fans back in the 1990s and now Electronic Arts, in collaboration with Starbreeze Studios, is bringing back the franchise in the form of a first person shooter.
While we have been pretty impressed with what we’ve seen up until now thanks to videos and screenshots, it’s time to actually try out the shooter, as the two companies have released a demo that lets players engage in the four-player cooperative mode.
Right from the beginning of the co-op mode, you’re treated with a small video that shows off gameplay and a variety of situations in which you’ll find yourself, like healing squadmates, helping take down enemy defenses or using your special abilities to extract implanted chips from defeated opponents.
However, while the video is quite interesting, it doesn’t actually highlight what buttons you need to push or how you can pull off these maneuvers. As such, right when you start the actual match, after choosing your character, its loadout and special powers, you have no idea how to play.
There are on-screen prompts to heal companions or hack terminals but, besides that, you’re pretty much on your own, hoping that control schemes from other shooters, like Call of Duty or Battlefield, still apply in the cyberpunk future of Syndicate.
As far as actual gameplay, the title is pretty entertaining, although it gets a bit dull over time. You just go from open area to open area, start by killing off simple opponents while taking care to avoid the gunfire of the bigger enemies, like sergeants or special commanders. These tougher units first require you to get close and disable their shields or protections, and then shoot them with everything you got.
In case you’re taken down, you have a limited period to crawl to safety or towards your nearest buddy. If they fail to heal you, your body remains on the battlefield before it’s rebooted by a friend.
Unfortunately, Syndicate doesn’t really try to promote this teamwork, as even if there’s only one single living member of a squad, the game just sends enemies towards him, meaning he’ll either be quickly overwhelmed or he’ll forget about his squad mates while fending off the adversaries.
If everybody dies, you’re taken back to the last checkpoint, of which there are quite a few, at least in the Western Europe scenario available in the demo.
For an almost complete playthrough of the Syndicate co-op demo, check out the video above.