A later example fires swathes of heat-seeking rockets that demand multiple mid-air breaches in the space of a few milliseconds. The first boss is a teleporting bullet sponge, who is closer to an MMO raid boss in terms of his health bar and the time investment it takes to kill him. The resulting battles are uniformly painful in their own special ways. Syndicate generously shares its nearfuture setting and theme of transhumanism with Deus Ex, but it also has that game's awful approach to boss fights, augmenting them to make them even worse. Syndicate is riddled with oddly tough difficulty spikes, even on normal settings: I had to replay one section chock-full of drones and soldiers over and over, spending most of my 40-odd minutes alternating between loudly swearing and exasperatedly gurning at a screen coloured about-to-die red.īut standard fights pale in comparison with the facepunching frustration of the game's bosses. More common was a clumsy death behind a cheerfully identified bin. Moments of personal impressiveness, where I was able to manipulate both the environment and my enemies with my supposed range of powers, were few and far between. Most are equipped with personal shields, meaning I had to pop out of cover and take a few chaingun rounds in the face before my DART chip agreed that the bastard shooting at me was worthy of targeting, and gave me the option to knock out its defences. Syndicate has a strange affection for the shooter's most hateful of baddies, seasoning the game liberally with airbound drones and droids. More tiresome are the game's legion of flying foes. Developers Starbreeze want you to think cleverly to undo this second skin, but the solution isn't particularly graceful: hide behind a wall, hold an arbitrary key – E, using the default controls – and go about your murderous business as you would on a standard enemy. You need to breach this protective layer before these miniboss enemies can be put down permanently. Some foes add another layer of defence, piling crystalline armour over their standard figure-hugging ensemble. Without it enemies are meat-shields, taking half a clip of Syndicate's standard TAR assault rifle without flinching.
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Deployed properly, it kicks enemies out of cover and weakens them, allowing them to be killed with one or two follow-up shots. Backlash is the cheapest, and I used it by far the most.
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Persuade is more applicable in a tight spot, giving you a moment of freedom as a room retargets their weapons on a former colleague.Īll skills cost different amounts of adrenaline to use. Both Backlash and Suicide are mechanically similar, providing an area of effect attack of varying strength.
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All are darkly funny in application – the sadness of a persuaded foe goaded into killing himself is palpable through several layers of body armour – but they're not different or useful enough to replace sustained gunfire as your weapon of choice. Persuade convinces an enemy to join your cause and kill his friends, before turning his rifle on himself.
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Backlash detonates the ammunition in a weapon, jolting the victim and making them susceptible to attack. Suicide convinces an enemy to yank out a grenade, prime it, and hold onto it.