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Desync Review

by Omar (@siegarettes)

• Desync
• Developer- The Forgone Syndicate
• Publisher- Adult Swim Games
• PC (Steam)

Upon starting up Desync I could immediately hear someone somewhere beginning to write a thinkpiece about how with the release of Desync and nuDOOM shooters are finally returning to their glorious past. But while DOOM learned from, and subsequently owes a debt to, the last decade of shooter design, Desync fails to do the same.

Desync, at the least, makes a good first impression. There’s an obvious reverence for titles like Quake, Unreal Tournament and Bulletstorm here. Its perspective, level layouts and weaponry make direct nods towards early shooters. On top of that it borrows Bulletstorm’s skillshot system, even riffing on particular executions from it. It’s a good system to borrow, and early on there’s a certain satisfaction to seeing that score attack approach filtered through Desync’s neon and digital artifacts. Even with some initial misgivings, the first two hours of Desync were probably the most I’d enjoyed a new shooter in a while. Everything after that quickly soured any good will had towards it.

The more you play, the more it becomes clear that Desync is lacking seriously in the fundamentals. Weapons never feel powerful, especially against larger foes who demand tons of firepower. Movement, while fast, quickly becomes inadequate against the more complex waves of enemies that are thrown at you. You can mitigate this by equipping various abilities and upgrades, allowing you to move faster or hit harder.

This initially seemed like a promising addition, and I crafted a specialized loadout that rewarded dodges with swifter movement, and aggressive approaches with more damage. And it worked well with weaker enemies, allowing me to stun enemies, then dash straight into danger and chain point-blank shotgun kills to earn the score needed to make abilities available and refill your ammo. Then Desync began to add more and more larger enemies, who not only could kill you in one or two hits, but might have large shields that are difficult to maneuver around, or could teleport right above you and drop in for an instant kill.Then it mixes those in with small spiderbots that grab onto your face, waves of smaller enemies, in rooms full of traps that are more likely to kill you than be helpful. And once you get past those, it’ll maybe put two teleporting enemies alongside, spiders and some flying enemies .

In theory, you can craft a loadout that can deal with all of this, powering you through a chain of combos to activate large boosts than help you quickly take down larger enemies before they become a problem. Instead you’ll probably find that any mistake is punished so severely that it quickly becomes more effective to play conservatively. You develop an attack sequence through rote memorization of spawns and timing, and hope you earn enough currency to buy upgrades to make the next run less tedious. Instead of playing creatively and expressively, it became an act of labor and endurance.

This isn’t helped by how Desync never gives you space to play in, and fails to communicate when you’re in danger. While Bulletstorm allowed you to set enemies up by trapping them in localized stasis, Desync asks you to do it at the speed of an online deathmatch. And yes, you could theoretically use the ability that increases the stun time on enemies, but it often took enough time to build up, and lasted such a short time that it was rarely available during actual opportune times. That’s the trend for every one of the abilities that Desync gives you. It seems opposed to giving you the tools to play creatively.

The chaotic pace of the game becomes even more of a liability as it goes on. Feedback from attacking enemies is weak, and what feedback there is obscured by the artificial glitches, busy enemy and environment designs, and color palette that fails to separate objects from each other. Even with the effects toned down (which I did immediately), and the pulsating soundtrack muted, it remains overbearing. While games like Quake and Unreal Tournament have a distinct sense of space and clearly demarcated dangers, here you’ll likely find yourself backing up into and enemy you couldn’t see, falling into environmental traps, or just plain getting shot in the face because you couldn’t tell one neon bullet from the next. The longer I played the more I found myself confused at what had actually killed me.

All of this culminates when you enter what have got to be some of the worst boss fights in recent memory. And if you’re a fan of first person shooters then you know how low a mark that can be. Instead of trying to engage at all with the systems Desync is built around, boss fights see you endlessly circle strafing around a large enemy, whittling their massive health bar down by emptying all your ammo, with few chances to replenish it. Worse still, you’ll be mashing the dodge move the entire time, since your base speed is too slow to keep you out of range by itself.

There’s obviously a way that each boss is intended to be played, but again, it doesn’t take advantage of any of the systems Desync is built on, and the punishments here are even more severe than in the regular stages. You could jump over the bosses melee attacks as they come, firing in close proximity, but the animations are so awkward, your jump so impotent, and the timing window so short that you won’t, since missing that tiny window will force you to play the last five tedious minutes over again. And when you’re done with that, there’s another boss form afterward that kills you even faster and makes more of your weapons useless. It’s pure tedium that makes no use of the strengths it does have, and highlights every flaw it does.

Despite all of this there’s a certain kind of person who’ll not only enjoy Desync, but find a way to deny every criticism by claiming it as part of the hardcore experience. They’re the kind of player who laments the advent of the autosave, and pines for the ritual of perpetually quicksaving and quickloading. The kind of player who confuses labyrinthine, confusing maps for the expressive pacing and level design of early shooters. They’ll take on any challenge, no matter how tedious or poorly rewarded they are. That’s the kind of player who’ll fall in love with Desync.