Smart application of chip powers mixed with a solid shooter effort

Feb 16, 2012 15:41 GMT  ·  By

What we know:

Syndicate was a tactical video game that allowed players to control a team of agents in a hyper-violent future world. But the remake takes the name and the theme of a future dominated by corporations that are in a state of continuous low-level warfare and morphs the rest into a first-person shooter with some added special powers.

The two companies working on Syndicate have released quite a few trailers for the game and it seems to be fast paced and engaging, with bright futuristic vistas and some apparently clever enemies.

But the information offered so far has revealed less of the plot, which will be important for a game that has little in the way of very innovative mechanics, and the agent powers demonstrated so far have been interesting but not impressive.

Syndicate will be launched on January 21 in North America and three days later in Europe, on the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the PC.

Why it matters: Gamers tend to look down on the video games that employ names and ideas from old hits in order to sell simple, run-of-the-mill experiences that could use any other name they wanted.

Therefore, in order to deliver the good for Starbreeze and Electronic Arts, Syndicate needs to be pretty impressive when it comes to its shooting and to how it encourages players to use the mindhacking powers in order to get through game sections.

So far the vibe that Syndicate has been giving out has been close to that of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But without the deep role-playing game layers and the options to move around stealthily, that might be enough to sell the game to those looking for a good shooter in the early months of the year.

The full Incoming 2012 series of articles can be read on Softpedia right here.