frozen synapse
frozen synapse got into my collection through the humble indie bundle using its name. i don’t remember if i’d heard of it before the bundle but the tactical shooter aspect of it reminded me of jagged alliance, which i enjoyed back in the days of shareware.
the graphics are simple and complex at the same time. you get a top-down view of the rectangular (often square) combat zone which has a blue floor, blue walls, and light blue windows / tables. the combat units are green if controlled by you, red for the enemy, yellow if allied but not under your control, and cyan for “enemy” civilians. you can see their weapons and body shapes, and when shot they spatter blood on the floor / walls in a realistic way. so it’s simple in that the environment is not especially detailed (only what you need to know to make tactical decisions), yet complex in the way you can see a rocket launcher laying on the ground near a dead guy who used to be carrying it.
i started out playing against the computer and before i was even through the tutorial noticed i wasn’t very good at it. turns out frozen synapse is hard, especially if you go straight for your objectives right away (this gets you killed). i did somewhat quickly alter my tactics to something more effective against the computer. toward the end of the campaign i was able to consistently take out 8 enemy units with 3 of my own. the initial difficulty could turn off some players, but probably not the ones looking for a tactical challenge.
while the campaign is actually very well thought out with story and everything, the main focus is playing against another person, which is typically even harder. the game keeps track of a multiplayer level, so you can get somewhat of an idea for how much the other person has played (or at least won against other people). i’m currently at level 7 and am not sure what it will take to reach level 8, but it doesn’t seem possible to drop back down to level 6 by losing a lot. there are a couple issues with multiplayer though. the first is the red / yellow / green indicator for whether you want a game. most of us would expect red to mean you don’t want to be invited to games, but then it shows you popups that some dude wants to play some game mode. you can ignore those, but it sort of feels like red status doesn’t work. it’s also a little complicated to play with friends. frozen synapse doesn’t know about your steam friends so you have to find and add them within the game, and there are multiple servers to connect to but games and friends aren’t shared across servers. so if you’re like me and have friends playing frozen synapse on both the uk1 and the texas servers, you actually have to quit the game and then start over and choose the other server to play there. of course once you get into a game none of that matters.
if you don’t have much time, you can still play frozen synapse because it saves progress up through the last committed turn if you quit mid-mission. this is true of both the single-player campaign and multiplayer matches. in fact multiplayer often requires you to play one or two turns and then quit because your opponent is offline. the game sends you an e-mail when you have a turn to play by default if you’re not currently in-game, making it easy to play with people who aren’t online the same times as you.
i had put in 34 hours of play time by the time i finished the campaign, with a dozen or so multiplayer matches thrown in. there’s a lot of content in the campaign, and the more difficult missions are going to take multiple attempts (it must have been at least my tenth attempt at the final mission when i finally achieved victory) so there’s plenty of time to spend in frozen synapse even just by yourself. and then of course there’s playing against friends or random internet people, which is different every time. there’s a dlc expansion simply named “red” that adds another unit type, game mode, campaign, co-op play to the original and new campaigns, and a few other things. i really appreciate that a player with red can use its content even when playing with a player who doesn’t have it — games that require everyone playing together to have bought the dlc in order for anyone to use it are frustrating.
this is also the first game where i liked the soundtrack enough to listen to it outside the game. the humble bundle included the soundtrack and so did the red dlc. the red soundtrack gets added in with the original soundtrack and a random track gets chosen to play during your game.
frozen synapse costs $25, but also comes with an extra copy for a friend, or $30 if you also want a copy of the soundtrack for yourself (your friend just gets the game). if you have a friend to split it with then it’s definitely worth it, and it’s better with a few friends anyway. i say it’s worth about $20 for one copy. since i like this game so much and bought the red dlc i will probably write about that once i’ve finished its campaign and tried out most of its new content. frozen synapse joins the ranks of my always-installed multiplayer games, so feel free to challenge misterhaan to a game!