Syndicate (game, 2012)

The game is a first-person shooter. The player can carry two types of weapons and several grenades. Thanks to the DART 6 bio-chip, the player can scan, hack and receive intelligence directly in battle. There are three types of “hacking” enemies: “Suicide”, in which the victim of hacking commits suicide, undermining himself and his closest allies, “Suggestion”, in which the enemy temporarily becomes an ally of the player, and “Overload”, in which the enemy’s weapon leaves for several seconds out of order, stunning him and making him vulnerable to subsequent attacks.

Massively Multiplayer Game

The four-player co-op mode has been confirmed, with a separate storyline that is associated with a single-player game and made on the basis of missions from the original game. Players will have to advance their "Syndicate" to the top of the world, completing a variety of missions (including nine classic tasks from the original Syndicate ) and winning new chip models from competitors.

Based on the storyline of the popular tactical game Syndicate 1993 , Starbreeze makes a modern remake in the spirit of cyberpunk and dystopia , changing the genre to action ^[4] .

Political power has faded into the shadow of big business - corporations have now ruled the world, sharing the entire globe. The population is controlled using chip neuroimplants ^[5] .

Starbreeze CEO Michael Nermark says, “ In a future similar to the Machiavelli world, power is not shared by governments, but by commercial syndicates . In the information world, all of humanity has long passed to the use of implants , endowing the carrier with unprecedented abilities. Of course, any coin has a downside. Syndicates creating implants do not miss the opportunity to use them in a continuous internecine struggle for power. Conflict regulators are specially trained, genetically and electronically modified intelligence agents, including our protagonist. "

The script for the project was written by Richard Morgan , a British science fiction writer who created the plot for Crysis 2 .

Characters

Main Campaign

• Miles Kilo - the main character, an agent of the corporation EuroCorp, performs dangerous instructions of the corporation. It has the most advanced DART chip.
• Jules Merit is Miles' friend and mentor. He also performs corporation assignments with him.
• Lily Drol is a leading employee of EuroCorp, the creator of DART chips.
• Jack Denham is the main antagonist, head of the American division of EuroCorp.
• Tatsuo Hamilton is an Aspari syndicate agent.
• Ramon Rios is an agent of the Cayman Global syndicate.
• Chris Logos Delaney is the leader of the BBG terrorist organization (The Towers Will Burn). Collaborated with Lily Drol.

Cooperative mode

• Akuma
• Tomir Darius
• Adrian Fall
• Emma Talos

When pre-ordering the game, the player will receive a set of The Executive Package , which will include:

• Several unique perks that players can use in cooperative mode for four players.

When ordering a special edition Exclusive Edition , the player will receive:

• Cooperative weapons of pure gold;
• Golden dart chip and visor;
• Unique Exclusive Gold Syndicate Gold Logos.

For the first time about the game it became known in February 2008 when the Swedish studio Starbreeze announced the conclusion of an agreement with Electronic Arts to develop two games. One of them, which was directly related to Jason Bourne , was eventually canceled, while another game was officially started to be developed. The early Syndicate project was known as Project RedLime .

In an interview with reporters of the computerandvideogames.com portal, Starbreeze CEO Michael Nermark openly stated: “ At the moment, we are working with EA on the RedLime project. I can’t go into details now, but I’ll say that RedLime is the studio’s largest project in its history. ”

The announcement of the game was to be held at E3 2011 . In a May report to shareholders about the work done by the studio over the year, Mikael Nermark announced that EA and Starbreeze decided to increase the "scale" of Project RedLime and make the project more voluminous and "magnificent". To this end, they expanded the staff of the studio to 120 people who developed RedLime .

On September 10, 2011, a leak occurred and a detailed description and screenshots of the new game, hiding behind the name Syndicate, were uploaded to the digital distribution service Origin .

Two days later, the developers officially announced the game and it became known that the name of the game was renamed Syndicate .

Syndicate received many positive reviews from critics. So the American website Giant Bomb awarded the game a rating of 5/5 stars, and praised the weapon and the interesting world, as well as its cooperative mode. IGN gave the game a score of 7.5 and praised the co-op, shooting, and gameplay, while sharply criticizing the single player campaign for repeated boss fights. The GameTrailers website gave the game a score of 8.2, citing the gameplay as fun and innovative, but reacted negatively to a predictable storyline and a fairly short six-hour campaign. Edge Magazine rated 6 out of 10 possible, criticizing the mechanics of the game, the linear structure of the levels, and the usual mission goals. However, Edge came to the conclusion that, despite this flaw, the shooting in it still looks commendable.

Many players criticized the light bloom effect used in the game, sometimes hiding the player’s field of vision during the game, which greatly interfered with the gameplay. Some unofficial solutions for the bloom effect problem are related to using the developers console (on the PC version of the game) to manually configure the game’s graphical settings. On console versions of the game, no solution was found.

Game Sales

In an interview with reporters at Computer and Video Games , Frank Gibot, head of Electronic Arts , told the website that Syndicate's sales were not as successful as expected: “ We knew Syndicate was fraught with great risk. And they were ready for failure, ”says Frank Jibault. - Yes, the project did not pay off. But my appetites for remakes didn’t decrease at all. In search of some interesting brand for the next generation of consoles, I will gladly once again look into our library of games. After all, this is exactly the essence of our business: something works, something doesn’t. ”

In a recent interview with Edge, Mikael Nermark, CEO of Swedish video game developer Starbreeze Studios, said the game sold a total of 150,000 copies worldwide.

Immediately after the official release of the game, the top management of Starbreeze Studios conducted a series of layoffs, as a result of which twenty-five ordinary developers and one top manager lost their places. The reasons for such a sharp dismissal were not disclosed.

Game Bans

December 20, 2011 , it was reported that the game will be banned for sale in Australia by the certification commission of the country . The council criticized that there was excessive violence in the game, explicit images of dismemberment, decapitation and a scene with copious amounts of blood. EA Australia announced that they will not appeal the decision or make changes to the game, and they decided that Syndicate will be released in Australia and New Zealand with a modified gameplay, in particular, the ability to dismember and decapitate, interact with the corpses of enemies, will be removed and kill innocent civilian NPCs .

• Official site
• Syndicate wiki