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Syndrome is a collaboration between Bigmoon Games & Camel 101, Bigmoon being involved with Lichdom: Battle Mage, Alekhine’s Gun & Jagged Alliance: Back in Action to name a few, while Camel 101 only have one other game under their belt – the real-time-strategy title Mechs & Mercs Black Talons.
Both are pretty small studios, but they take care and pride in what they are doing, crafting their art and quick to squash bugs on reports from users. Lichdom, as an example, had a REALLY bad framerate on its Xbox One and PS4 release, but Bigmoon kept at it and now they game is a lot more playable and the framerate issues are sorted.
Syndrome takes the sci-fi survival horror of numerous movies and games and mixes things up a bit. It feels like the inspiration is taken from Alien Isolation, but also throw in a bit of System Shock 2 & Cryostasis for good measure, then add a bit of Event Horizon (the great movie starring Laurence Fishburne & Sam Neill), mixed with the claustrophobic-isolated atmosphere of the Alien movie franchise and away you go.
You wake from a cryosleep, on board the Valkenburg; dazed and confused, your radio springs to life as you learn there are a few people trapped and you need to get the power restored on the ship. As you start exploring, you notice droids are dotted about, but powered down. A lack of crew members and generally a bit too quiet, and upon further investigation you start discovering bodies with missing limbs and strung up. Dotted about, after restoring the power, you’ll find PDAs, much like Doom 3 with snippets of information in the form of personal logs and emails on computers. These items help you start building up a picture of just what has gone on here. Once a few tasks like the power restoration and getting the engines up and running (essentially after getting a keycard from the medical center), you learn some marines had brought an artefact on board and the crew started acting strange. Many have been killed, but others are now roaming the ship, mutated with mechanical fittings (think Star Trek‘s Borg crossed with the early enemies from System Shock 2).
The gameplay will take you to most corners of the vast ship and its 8 decks. Early on, you’re tasked with firing up the engine, but that, in itself, has numerous tasks attached to it. So here, you start venturing further into the bowels, to get through an adjoining tunnel – for example, you have to venture to a lower deck, retrieve a tool which will open the small access ways, in turn getting you past a fire. Then, head towards the medical bay, spotting a detention area on the left, collect an access card and then head back to the lower deck, unlock the detention centre, head back there and use a round saw to retrieve the corpse’s hand for security clearance and so on. There’s a lot of back and forth in this game, going down various dimly-lit corridors, and the like.
Now, the enemies – in Alien Isolation, there is just one creature and numerous robots to avoid/hide or destroy. Syndrome sees the crew mutated so you have the option of stealth or out-and-out combat. The tool you get, which is like a large rigger’s wrench, is also a weapon. There are guns, but ammo is very sparse so keeping hold of them is a must for harder encounters that escalate. I have found, in most cases, the stealth goes out the window (I do like stealth games, but Syndrome is really hard going), and you can take enemies out in the same way as System Shock 2: step forward and hit then step back, rinse and repeat to take them out. Like I have mentioned previously, you’re contacted occasionally with various objectives from a crew member who’s holed up somewhere. At other times, you’ll need to find PDAs that have specific door codes, often searching proactively search to locate these if you hit a dead end.
The game is powered by Unity 5, hence why it is available on all systems outside Windows PCs, like Mac & Linux. It makes the developer’s job considerably easier to develop cross-platform. The overhead is considerably less than something like Frostbite or Unreal Engine, so it scales well and will run on virtually every system which is great for a wider audience. The different areas of the ship all look different – cryosleep area at the start is different to crew quarters, engine room is a lot different to the medical bay etc., and the lighting is excellent if a bit static, in places. The texture work is nice on all models and the environment. The only issues that I have really encountered, is that everything is locked into its place; chairs don’t move when bumped into, and corpses look static and placed rather than a crew member slumping to death somewhere. The lighting, while really good at times, is overly dark and you can easily miss the torch. Fair enough, something has gone terrible wrong on this ship, but why does everywhere have to be so dark absolutely everywhere on the ship?? Playing Alien Isolation, not everything is extremely dark: tension is built from being hunted, which is what the crew are doing with you on Syndrome. There are some great effects, such as when you get close to death, the screen goes blurry and pulsates, and there are jump scares in places where the screen will distort, while an unnerving aspect for me is seeing the glowing red eyes of an enemy – it really gives you the chills!
The sound direction is excellent. Radio chatter is fully voiced, but I cannot find anything about the voice actors, unfortunately. Sounds like the swing of your weapon and gunshots all sound as they should. Mind you, the growls and loud grunts of the crew are really creepy and heighten your sense of dread. I won’t lie, I was playing late with lights off, with just the TV on in the background on quiet. There is a scene in the medical bay that startled me, and then on the way back out, hearing some loud growling, I had to turn it off for the night, and I normally do horror and have a laugh at the likes of Insidious and Annabel!
All in all, Syndrome is a good game. It is creepy and atmospheric. There has been a lot of work put into logs etc., building up and piecing together just what has happened. I don’t like having to go and do fetch-quests though. I just knew I was going to have to get into the detention centre at some point, and it meant heading to a lower deck a second time, after just being there retrieving the vent tool. It becomes a little tedious having to do what is more commonly considered as fetch-quests.
The only issues I encountered, were using a controller when activating the power near the start, you can’t select anything on the screen in-game and I was having to alt/tab out and ‘end task’. Once playing with mouse and keyboard, though, things work fine. However, this may be an issue with my wired Rock Candy Xbox One controller, as I had issues with I am Setsuna and this same controller. Maybe it has something to do with Unity. The other issue is the game sets to the same as (1600×900, due to small text on net etc.), I can up the resolution within the game, but there is no ‘apply’ button, so it literally does nothing. Literally, if I want to run at 1920×1080 I have to change my desktop first, and then in-game it will be set to 1080p.
Thanks to those Youtube channels featured for the gaming footage.
Syndrome is out now on and Steam, Mac and Linux, all as downloads, with Xbox One and PS4 due in 2017.
Important info:
- Developers: Camel 101 and Bigmoon Entertainmenty
- Publisher: Camel 101
- Players: Single player
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| OVERALL | 7.5 |
Retro at heart and lover of all things ’80s, especially the computers, the music and the awesome movies and TV shows! Crazy huge retro gaming collection spanning the ’80s and ’90s with hundreds of tapes, discs and carts for various machines on top of a 600+ strong Steam library that is ever-growing. No I am not a serial hoarder, just a dedicated retro gamer!
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