DESYNC (PC) Review

DESYNC starts in a pretty weird way. The "protagonist" appears in a VR-like hub, where the player can observe its - overused - neo-futuristic audio-visuals, with scanlines filling the screen, sudden digital "glitches," and a pretty atmospheric synthwave tune bopping along. It's neither subpar, nor the best iteration of this particular stylistic approach, and it's not what's weird here. That would be how this game starts with the character slowly walking towards an equally slow-descending elevator, and all this just to choose a level to play, when all that it needs is a bullet-fast level selection menu and nothing else.

The reason why this feels strange here, is the simple fact that this is basically a single-player arena shooter; one that's all about the action. Sure, this is just a small nitpick, not a major game-breaking flaw, but, to be honest, it's also a taste of things to come, as the developing team behind it all didn't handle its idea as well as it should, which is a same, as it's one with plenty of potential.

The main concept revolves around the simple goal of moving from one "arena" to the next, killing everything that moves before doing so. Is that all? Not really. This is a fight for the highest place in the leaderboards, with the tricky part being the fact that this is something requires more than just reaching the finishing line. How is a higher score achieved, then? By using the so-called 'Sequences;' techniques that greatly alter what happens on the battlefield.

These are nothing more than a list of manoeuvres that range from simply killing a foe with a weapon's secondary attack or doing so with area-of-effect damage, to using evasions or switching weapons between kills. Besides boosting the score, these also provide some small benefits like health or ammo drops, and while this may sound similar to how Doom pushes the action forward, it's nothing like that, sadly.

For starters, the Sequence system in particular is somewhat broken, and as a result, is annoyingly unhelpful, with moves that offer bonuses that are not worth the trouble, or some that, apart from raising the score a bit higher, don't really increase the actual fun factor - which leads to the basic flaw of DESYNC, which is that the combat section just isn't satisfying, because, while at its core it follows the "never stop moving" formula of many popular FPS titles, it severely fails at it.

90% of the kills will be pulled off while 180-running, since most enemies (and especially the big strong brutes) are way too fast. Apart from being irritating, this leads to another problem. It's impossible to see where enemies are coming from, since there's no audio or visual feedback, meaning that they frequently gang up on you from all directions, beating you in milliseconds. Finally, there's almost zero feel of range or speed - very bad for such a demanding title.

Of course, this isn't a moan at the high difficulty of it all - that's actually a good thing. It's just that hard games should not feel so because of their broken design. Speaking of which, DESYNC is, for the time being at least, a technical mess. While crashes are not a rarity, the biggest issue is that it's heavily unoptimised, even leading to GPU overheats in builds that can actually run the latest triple-A FPS with ease.