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SYNCED - a free but good shooter

11K View2022-12-04

You play in a sealed region - the Meridian. It is not allowed to enter here, but you are a Runner, and of course you don't care if it is allowed. The possible wealth that can be found here is far too tempting, even tough it is also quite dangerous. The Meridian is full of Nanos, strange creatures that kill you on sight (unless you shoot them first). The whole scenario is a bit like in STALKER, that also took place in a region where normal people would NOT enter.

You can walk, sneak around, jump, run... all the usual movement options. Pressing the RMB allows you to aim your current gun. The environment is shown in third-person perspective, which helps to keep a good overview in the heat of a firefight (and not getting motion sick). You usually fight against swarms of (weak) enemies, so moving and shooting while also not loosing the orientation is important.

You carry an armband, called a Runner's best friend. Actually, you can use it to switch your character, there are different characters available. The beta version had three characters plus and additinal two to unlock. A medic, a sniper and a fighter, I also unlocked the first unlockable character which came with a very handy SMG. You can also select your Companion Nano here out of four classes available . Finally, you can switch your weapons, the number of available weapons is quite large.

You start every game from the Hive - your home base. Upgrade your character here with mods. Here you also select from the two available game modes - either Nerva Runs (PvP) or Dead Sector Runs (PvE). In Nerva Runs, your goal is to collect more Nerva than the other teams. Steal it from automatic Nerva collecting vessels (harvester drones), kill the other Team trying the same and steal from their dead bodies, kill Nanos walking around in the location, but don't get killed too often. You get pulled out from the mission after you have lost threee lives. You normally play in a team of three players, but if you have no friends you can also play alone. Actually works quite nice that way, just don't attack an enemy team head on.

Apart from killing other human players in the PvP mode, in PvE and PvpP modes you also fight the computer controlled Nanos by shooting at their weak point, and when they are weakened enough - sync them to take over their body. Store them inside your armor, release them when you need someone to fight. Collect Radia and buy temporary buffs (powerful mods). Collect Nova, which is a valuable energy source and brings you lot of money. Surge Storms are places full of Nanos, and they usually come with very strong Locus Nanos as well. Kill the Locus Nanos, and you have cleared the Surge Storm. Your radar always shows you the direction to the next Surge Storm.

Quite surprisingly, SYNCED comes with full spech in various languages, from English to German, French, Korean, Japanese or Chinese, even Turkish. I am not sure for the final game, but the beta does NOT contain single player content. Also the progress you make during the beta will not carry over to the final game. Gamepad works fine, although I prefered to play with mouse and keyboard, like in nearly all fps games. System requirements seem to be quite reasonable, I could play perfectly well with one of my office PCs containing a not-so-powerful (or new) Geforce 1050. The game is not only visually impressive and supports ultrawide-screen resolutions, I played in 3440x1440.

Conclusion

Cool upcoming free to play third person shooter.

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