Darting Around: Syndicate Coop
There has already been a short trailer showing the chip-fipping, face-slamming action of the Syndicate reboot, this being the boot that may stamp on the face of your gaming past forever. This longer video shows an actual play session on the same map, jumping between agents' viewpoints to confuse me but otherwise giving a fairly good idea of how things will play out. There will be lots of violence, death and use of cover. Strategy? Well, you'll have to wait for team-mates before opening certain doors and really tough men will absorb thousands of bullets so you'll need to heal one another during those fights. Oh, just look at it.
Persuadatronned? Probably not. I might start referring to new footage from the game as Persuadatrailers though.
Did the cuts from agent to agent confuse anyone else or am I just unable to follow because I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning? Possibly. Almost definitely actually. But no amount of coffee will convince me that I was watching anything more than shooty people shooting one another. Yes, that's always been what the series boiled down to, but if I didn't know this was Syndicate, there's not a lot there to suggest to me that it is. Except when it says the name at the end. I've had enough coffee to twig by that point.
It's often the case with this sort of video but the people playing don't seem hugely proficient. Maybe because they're trying to show that it's possible to miss headshots and shoot at the floor, which are important player choices. There is bullet time and some sort of heat vision, powered by artificial brain-wiring no less, but they are aids to the near-constant shooting rather than to planning or choice of approach.
In such a small map, it's hard to see tactical potential beyond basic role assignment and the final fight does seem to lend itself to MMO style allocation of medics and tanks. All that said, I'm rarely unhappy to have a coop option in my games and it could be a welcome addition to Kilomiles RobotFace's story. We'll see.