Syndicate review: The price of progress

It carries all the emotional duress inherent in a modern "re-imagining" of a classic title, to say nothing of a cult-hit PC classic like its namesake. It's also a cyber-punk opus in a post Deus Ex: Human Revolution world, a game that successfully reprocessed and repackaged the trappings of its subject matter into something fresh. How could Starbreeze, a developer known best for interesting but flawed titles like Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness, hope to overcome all that baggage?

Fortunately, Starbreeze seems to have deftly avoided any troublesome leftover luggage. Syndicate does justice to the original game's legacy, if not its basic gameplay mechanics, resulting in something much more interesting than expected.

Comparisons to last year's Deus Ex are inevitable, given the mutual influences, but Syndicate paints a decidedly different picture of a dystopian future. The revolution is over in Syndicate's 2069 – we lost. Powerful corporations have ascended to power over governments, engaging in low-grade war and espionage against each other, each treating the populace as a resource to be mined and exploited.

Syndicate's story starts with the status quo as you're tasked with industrial espionage against rival corporations that's anything but covert. But an early betrayal leads down a more complicated rabbit hole. Syndicate manages to avoid the tired "good man among evil men" cliches. Miles Kilo isn't a good person – he's barely human at all. But as the story unfolds, things are revealed as more complicated than they initially appeared, and no one gets to stay clean. Antiheroes are a cheap trope, but Syndicate handles that moral grey area well, possibly due to sci-fi author Richard Morgan's involvement with the script.

There's a clear effort at littering the world with enough information to build Syndicate's fiction in an organic way. It establishes a sense of history through allusion, rather than exposition. There are emails and databases with corporate secrets to hack with more hints to sketch the history of the future world Kilo operates in, and little details help here as well. But there's not much time to consider elements like the masked propaganda posters straight out of They Live, as Syndicate keeps you interacting with the world constantly. Sometimes, it's with the environment, though most often, it's by killing things.

Killing is almost always your goal in Syndicate. There are some bits of rudimentary puzzle solving involving the breach mechanic and environmental manipulation, but these seem present as a palate cleanser rather than anything meaningful. It's good then that combat in Syndicate demonstrates complexity and opportunity for experimentation.

Starbreeze have the good sense not to let Syndicate's single-player campaign wear out its welcome, and it just barely tiptoes into staying in one setting and a particular gameplay loop for too long towards the end of its six to seven hour length. Syndicate's campaign does a few things, and it does them well, but its focus is narrow.

Co-op does well to flesh out Syndicate from a fiction and breadth standpoint. Each cooperative mission is another Agent scenario involving day to day syndicate business – stealing tissue samples, hacking databases, and the like. Starbreeze has done well to take the unlock system and start everyone on support breach abilities. Working together in co-op is absolutely necessary for survival. Lone wolves won't just get themselves killed, they'll jeopardize their entire team, a team which should always be full, by the way. Syndicate's co-op missions don't scale based on player numbers, and the AI found in each mission isn't screwing around. Enemies are coordinated and weaponry designed to incapacitate unwary agents is ubiquitous. It's high-maintenance, but fun, assuming you can assemble a team who plays like one. But if you can't find the right partners (and perhaps start your own in-game syndicate), there's not much but frustration waiting for you.