Syndicates

Walking through the streets at night can be unnerving. Shadows have a tendency to loom and everyday noises start to sound like something you swear you heard in a horror movie once upon a time. Of course, chances are that it's all a figment of your imagination. Bogeymen aren't residing in every corner... yet.

They're around every corner in Syndicates, though. In fact, every single person in the game's massive city is more than a little dodgy. Which makes it okay to beat up on any and every person you come across because if you don't hit first, you'll get hit. The more people you pound into the pavement, the greater your power.

Add in the ability to rob buildings and amass wealth and this massively multiplayer online game becomes a race to become the city's richest, baddest thug. Sounds fun, right? Unfortunately, Syndicates isn't even a half-baked slide of gaming pizza - it's still dough.

There's almost nothing to do in the city. You just walk slowly around by tapping on the screen in the hopes of stumbling onto a building or rival gangster. Come face-to-face with another player and two health gauges appear. You then have to shake your handset to deplete your rival's health before they do the same to you.

Play for 15 minutes or so and you'll feel your wrist swell and turn red from all the frantic pumping. If you thought that accelerometer racing games were embarrassing to play in public, Syndicates is in a league all its own. So much so that it should really come with a health warning: Do Not Play for more than 15 minutes if you value your joints or dignity.

The city itself doesn't look too bad thanks to 3D buildings and a zoom function, which allows you to multi-touch in and out with notable ease. However, there's only a handful of different building types and one street looks much like any other. Sure, you could see Syndicates as a statement about the faceless nature of modern cities, but it only adds to the game's mind-numbing monotony.

Different buildings win you the same amount of money unless they've been recently looted by another player, in which case you won't get too much from them at all. Every time you return to your home building, any cash you're holding is banked and therefore safe.

If you're out and about with cash in your pocket, you're susceptible to being mugged by a rival player. There's not much point in venturing far afield anyway unless you're planning on an epic session, which isn't recommended considering the damage you'd do to your wrist.

There's no way to upgrade anything on your character - your speed, health and attack power never change. This means everyone walks around at the same speed, which makes it difficult to actually engage others in combat. Only when an opponent slips up in their escape or you manage to team up temporarily with other players can you hunt a competitor down.

The former is quite likely because navigation in Syndicates is pretty terrible. Although you can look around the city easily, actually getting anywhere is another matter. Your character always heads in a straight line toward whatever way point you set. If he hits a building or even catches the corner of one, he stops dead in his tracks.

Syndicates could have been a decent action-based massively multiplayer game to stand alongside the all too plentiful and more thoughtful iMafia-style games if it had a decent amount of content in it. In its current state, it comes across as little more than a shadow of an outline of a game, and terrible value for money considering its inflated price. It's daylight robbery inside and out.