Imagine a world with skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, you start walking towards the skyline only to be faced with an imaginary wall restricting you from reaching the skyline short of only lets say 20. Or better yet, say you go out and buy a model(car,plane, gundam,mech, etc..) and you finish only to be left wanting more due to your high expectations for the finished end result, that is how I feel about Syndicate.

In the distant future with it’s tall skyscrapers Syndicate features a world where iPhones are are a thing of the past, and ordering something off of Amazon is just a thought away. In this neo-future world, wifi isn’t done only done machine to machine, it’s done persone to machine, thanks to the new Dart chips everyone has, the highest bio-tech available. This futuristic Neuro-Chip(Brain chip) is what makes this tech savvy world tick. Much like the tech rivialry between Microsoft, Apple, and Google, Syndicates are the biggest and best in creating this ever evolving hardware. Unlike those holesome companies these cybernetic tech manufactures have squads of hitmen on payroll. Which is where you come in.

In Syndicate, you play as Miles kilo, who is an Agent working for Eurocorp, one of the companies producing the dart chip. You are the Bionic man, jump over tall chest high walls, slide on the the floor, and above all hack peoples minds, or “breaching”. While cool at first, breaching seems to widdle down to turning an enimeie into a variton of a human grenade, short term side kick, and rookie whose guns explodes. While all offer a different approach to sitiuations, there doesn’t seem enough of a difference bewteen them that would warrent to use them in specific situations and are pretty interchangable.

Throughout his travels as a Eurocorp agent, Kilo will visit New York, Los Angeles, the Atlantic Ocean, and the New York slums. While Kilo does seem to do a bit of taveling, the different locations don’t really seem all that different from eachother. With a few execptions, the rest of this futuristic world seems to have been sponsored by Clorox. All the enviorments seem to have been bleached clean, leaving very monitone levels that don’t have any sense of charachter to them.

The combat in Syndicate is above par which isn’t too bad. Most of the guns you find in the game have some sort of secondary fire which adds a bit of variety. While fighting you are only allowed to carry two guns at any time, which holds back gameplay as you can find a overpowing gun at the start of a level, in some cases a gatling gun and carry it with you troughout the level, making the player feel a lesser sense of satisfaction when beating a boss or room full of bad guys(or fish in a barrel) depending on what kind of arsenal is in your possesion.

Syndicate’s plot doesn’t really show alot of enthusiasm. In the begining it starts of great by introducing Kilo and his band of co-workers, then the game feels abit incomlete after the intial introduction of everyone as they start to become distant, thus not allowing the players to make get a any kind of connection with them. Even playing as Kilo I couldn’t really feel any kind of connection with his character, he didn’t say a single word through out the entire game. The closest thing players get to understanding what Kilo is going through are the fortune cookie-eque statements that pop up between completion of levels, that i can only assume are coming from someone with multi-core processor in their head.

When all is said and done, you’re left with a partially finished game. Which is okay, because the multi-player co-op  brings it all home. With its very borderlands like feel,co-op is where its at. Players chose from 4 classes of agents, the have the medic, the soldier, the scout and the Heavy. Each with customized guns load outs and special skill trees. Taking the same tactics from single player and applying them to a multi-player aspect. In the mode players infiltrate Syndicate strong holds to extract a target, facing waves of enemies ranging from grunts to bruisers. This mode sets up players for a very engaging multi-player experience, mainly because you can’t just blast your way through and have to use some sort of tactics to complete your goals. In closing even with decently cohesive story and adequately  put together game play, Syndicate makes for a fun time. Even with its short single player, co-op more than makes up for the rest of the games flaws.

Final Score: 4 out of 5