Synapse

I am sometimes described as an active opponent of VR, I realise. Nothing could be more wrong, even if I understand that those who only read what I wrote about VR as a game format six years ago and then didn't follow, here, may see me that way. I was, am and remain of the simple opinion that VR is a super-niche, specialised thing that in the form that currently exists will never reach even close to the mainstream impact that many advocates have stated. That said, I consider the VR experiences of Resident Evil 7, Astro Bot, Tetris Effect, Gran Turismno 7 and Half-Life: Alyx to be some of the most memorable gaming moments of the last six years and I'm still constantly waiting for the next big game. The next Alyx, if you will.

The problem, however, is that no one seems to dare. Apart from a few exceptions (which pretty much prove the rule) like Half-Life: Alyx, most of what is being rolled out are small mini-games, or glorified tech demos rather than lavishly large, memorable, ambitious killer titles. We still haven't seen the smoke of Call of Duty VR, Halo VR, God of War VR, Killzone VR, Grand Theft Auto VR or all the other seals that many were sure we'd be introduced to years ago. The format and technology remains difficult to sell, niche and complicatedly expensive, which of course means that those big name, heavyweight games that sell hardware - are not available.

However, I was very excited about Synapse for PSVR2, not least because the developers Ndreams are behind Fracked, which is very successful. The premise sounded really promising too, before the premiere. You play as a special agent who, like in Nolan's tightly wound thriller Inception, hacks into people's consciousness to break their minds, steal secrets and crush resistance in the form of concentrated evil. Your mission this time involves a particularly nasty uncle whose mind has been drowned in trigger-happy, highly lethal demon soldiers. Now you have to climb inside his skull and clear it all away. Everything will die. Everything. In the case of Synapse, an enemy-infected consciousness and a trigger-happy agent leads to a lot of very violent battles. However, in order to reach the age limit of 12+, Ndreams has wrapped all the excessive violence in a kind of stylistic, sterile dream thing that most resembles a black and white fever dream.

To help you clear the enemies out of the way, you of course have firearms but also telekinetic powers that allow you to pick up enemies, throw them around or pick up various objects and throw them at attacking "tanks". The setup and the ability that I as a player possess is very reminiscent of the old (painfully underrated) PS2 adventure Psi-Ops and the powers themselves feel a bit like being a firearm-equipped Darth Vader. There's something extremely rewarding and addictive about flinging enemies into the air and tossing them around like dishcloths while shooting holes in their soot-blackened bodies before they hit the ground. The balance between telekinetic powers and pure firearms works well and the symbiosis between them is brilliantly executed. As soon as I get the hang of the game mechanics, I usually feel like the baddest guy in the game world and during my gaming sessions I have wondered how this would work in a slightly different setting, with real people as enemies and more reality-based environments.

Therein lies one of the main problems with Synapse, for me. This whole black-and-white, fuzzy dream world in someone's "subconscious" quickly becomes tedious, I think, and the whole design would have worked much better as a small insert in a game whose environmental design and enemies should perhaps have rhymed more with reality. Or an excessively gnarly version of it. I find Synapse a bit like the nightmare sequences in Max Payne, where I'd rather spend a few minutes at a time to create variety from a different kind of setup, rather than an entire game. Furthermore, the clashes with the enemies are hopelessly monotonous after about an hour and the remaining ten that it took me to complete Synapse really just felt like regular repetition of the exact same thing, over and over and over again.

The feeling in the end rhymes with what I started the review with. Synapse has a very nice game mechanics that is the basis for everything, but since everything only breathes "glorified tech demo", it is difficult for me to really spew out any real superlatives, here. Ndreams should get a bigger budget, do something more substantial than what this turned out to be because they possess absolutely every conceivable capacity and knowledge to create shooter experiences that cannot be found outside the VR helmet.