Syndicate Review
- Thread starter Slycne
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My main probleem witht he co-op demo was the weapons didn;t fell very syndicate/syndicate wars like. It was just the usual pistols, rifles, smg's shotguns...nikki191 said:
Where were the flamethrowers, the miniguns, the laserguns, the nuke grenades, the mini rocket launchers. the orbital designator?
Make of it what you will, but your first real mission is to launch a counter-offensive against a terrorist group that took over a building and was threatening to murder people over their involvement in augmentations. Didn't seem to be a lot of wiggle room there. And the Illuminati rep (whose name currently escapes me) did want regulation/control rather than total abolition, but that was his unofficial stance. His fear was that they would make people too hard to control, but again, that was his private agenda, not the one he garnered support with.Voltano said:
Honestly, it was an unpredicted cliche for me. I expected it to be about corporate espionage/warfare, not one man's vendetta against his former patron. The former might've made the player something of a villain, but sometimes wars are fought amongst nothing but villains.Voltano said:
Well...they did start out as a pen-and-paper RPG, so really the best way to translate that into a video game would just be through a straightforward RPG.Voltano said:
But then again, I've never found a story system diverse enough or a dialogue system flexible enough to outweigh the advantages of a good DM running the show.
The rarely-used-term I think you're looking for is "adding injury to insult." Usually it's the other way around, but I think it's appropriate for this scenario.Voltano said:
Having just completed the single player on the hardest difficulty in around 8 hours (with dawdling) I have to say I'm quite disappointed. I don't mind short games if they are done well (Portal 2 for example), but Syndicate doesn't bother to spend any time trying to establish itself as a believable piece of sci-fi. It's a real shame because the concept behind Syndicate is actually quite cool and I wish I had played the original now to get a better overview. The co-op is superb but feels completely removed from the world of the single player, so really could just be a separate game in itself. I highly recommend picking it up when it's cheaper just for the co-op, as the amount of customisation (create you're own syndicate, upgrade weapons, abilities etc) is really quite refreshing.
Why are you giving three stars to a game that, in your words, is "bland and uninspired"? I don't think three stars adequately (or should adequately) represent a product you also say has "one saving grace", and is a "disappointment".Slycne said:
Stars, points, tomatoes or whatever other metrics are obviously (I hope) fairly weightless to most people, but they should at least allow for a rough guide upon glancing. Critics may be inflating scores, but there's no need to carry the trend. Give a game two stars if you don't think it's all that good. If people are out there looking for and believing anything less than four means a sub-par experience, it's their loss.
As for the review, I don't agree with it, but it's well written. Good work there.
I do wonder why you take issue with this, though: "[These] fights turn into hit-and-run grind fests as you whittle away at their health bars, run away to regenerate your own health and deal with each boss's gimmick." That more or less describes every boss fight in the modern (and not so modern) gaming universe, lol. Just seems odd to me that you take particular issue with it here.
I guess to me that sentiment, and how I reflected it in the score, simply means average. It's not bad or broken just not great either. So with the co-op being decent and breaching having its moments, I felt that combined with an otherwise average game yielded a 3.Grey Day for Elcia said:
We have a general breakdown of what you can expect from our scores here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/7149-What-Our-Review-Scores-Mean]. If you're interested in getting a gauge of what we think each score more or less means.
Thanks.
Certainly some, but I would say far from most. It's a pretty core tenent that boss fights usually represent the culmination of your mastery of some specific or all gameplay elements.
Perhaps I might have made the point better, but with regards to Syndicate it felt like their primary gameplay hook, breaching, became a tertiary element instead of being highlighted in boss fights. The Cayman Global fight was actually pretty spot on and used breaching well throughout, everything else was just kind of a slog.
I could argue that one with you, but I won'tSlycne said:
I get what you meant by that quote now, too; that you disliked seemingly throwing out a game mechanic for boss encounters, instead of finding a way to incorporate Breaching, as with every other enemy.
This game sounds a lot like Deus Ex gone wrong, stripped down to only it's shooting basics and way too shorter (6 hours against 20 to 30).
I've been playing a lot of Deus Ex Human Revolution lately (thanks to it's discounted weekend and a lovely dicount coupon, it only costed me 2 more bucks than the original Deus Ex) and everything from the video just reminded me of Deus Ex, but in a bland and boring shooter.
I don't know if it's my style of play or because my character is still a whimp or I just plainly suck at the game, but everytime I get stuck into a hairy gunfight, I try to get out without actually firing too many bullets, unless I'm forced to, I don't go guns blazing everywhere.
I've been playing a lot of Deus Ex Human Revolution lately (thanks to it's discounted weekend and a lovely dicount coupon, it only costed me 2 more bucks than the original Deus Ex) and everything from the video just reminded me of Deus Ex, but in a bland and boring shooter.
I don't know if it's my style of play or because my character is still a whimp or I just plainly suck at the game, but everytime I get stuck into a hairy gunfight, I try to get out without actually firing too many bullets, unless I'm forced to, I don't go guns blazing everywhere.
Honestly I loved that Skrillex song but I wished it was used in the other boss fights or that the fights had something amazing to them because that song feels a bit left out.
I felt betrayed by EA. This game was so linear and short that I wasn't surprised by all the betrayal thing and the flow of this game was so fast. In fact I hate how the game takes those fun moments of the cool weapons from you. I wished those segments were longer and had some cool fights because to me it was like the game was slapping me in the face to think I would have any fun with it.
Well I can't beat this game too hard when I got it for $45 on EBay and to me now that makes it a good game. I just hate when something like this happens; we are given a video of a game that looks great but fails expectations in the end... *looks at Warhammer 40K: Space Marine*.
I felt betrayed by EA. This game was so linear and short that I wasn't surprised by all the betrayal thing and the flow of this game was so fast. In fact I hate how the game takes those fun moments of the cool weapons from you. I wished those segments were longer and had some cool fights because to me it was like the game was slapping me in the face to think I would have any fun with it.
Well I can't beat this game too hard when I got it for $45 on EBay and to me now that makes it a good game. I just hate when something like this happens; we are given a video of a game that looks great but fails expectations in the end... *looks at Warhammer 40K: Space Marine*.
