Xbox 360 Magazine June 2012

MINECRAFT PROTOTYPE 2 DRAGON’S DOGMA Issue 86 June 2012

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ISSUE 86: BLACK OPS 2 FIFA 13 CRYSIS 3 PROTOTYPE 2 FEZ MINECRAFT ALIENS: COLONIAL MARINES LOST PLANET 3 FABLE HEROES FAR CRY 3

HOW TO BE A GAME TESTER What does it take to beat bugs for a living?

FAR CRY 3

Preview: this is your game on drugs

EA’s update keeps it simple: first details and screens!

WORLD EXCLUSIVE

This isn’t modern warfare.

It’s what comes next

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Issue 86 June 2012

£5.99

INSIDE PRE-PAID GAMING BIG BUG HUNTING THE MIND OF MOLYNEUX THE PRICE OF FUN

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Issue 86 June 2012

Welcome...

How the world’s biggest game got remade I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting to be surprised by Call of Duty. Who would?

It’s become the FIFA of first-person shooters, updated annually yet unable to deviate from the basic and hugely successful model. Without even a new name this year, what could Treyarch change?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Yes, it’s still a combination of bombastic single-player and endless online multiplayer, but almost everything else is out to rebut the complaints levelled at it each year. A story that’s not only halfway credible, but branching. Multiple endings. The option to choose your own path rather than be rushed down a fixed one. Talking with Treyarch, there’s the inspiring sense of a team striving to advance the game rather than simply rehash it, and while we’ve only seen the first stages it’s clear that more lies ahead. Find out more on p32.

At the other end of game development scale, it was fascinating to watch parodic game ideas blossom into a mass of lunatic prototypes, as programmers worldwide joined the Molyjam (p44). For all that they were supposed to be uncommercial, the results are worth buying. Enjoy the issue.

Jon Hicks OXM Jonty jon.hicks@futurenet.com

The team–andhowtheyspentthemonth

Editor Jon Hicks Gamertag: OXM Jonty T: 020 7042 4681 E: jon.hicks@futurenet.com

Deputy Editor Mike Channell Gamertag: OXMMightySeven T: 020 7042 4683 E: mchannell@futurenet.co.uk

Staff Writer Jon ‘Log’ Blyth Gamertag: OXM Log T: 020 7042 4682 E: jon.blyth@futurenet.com

Staff Writer Matt Lees Gamertag: OXM JamSponge T: 020 7042 4690 E: matt.Lees@futurenet.com

Successfully fought off an attempted mugger. Thanked GTA for the inspiration and Dance Central for the physical conditioning.

A banner event in the games industry this month: there was a party that Mike didn’t attend. An inquiry as to why is now ongoing.

Was brought to a new and slightly confused audience as the OXM Breakdown video series launched on Inside Xbox on Xbox Live.

Took great delight in going into Edwin’s Minecraft world and stealing all his stuff. The resultant war may well last for generations.

Online Editor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell Gamertag: OXMETboy

Writer Andy Robinson Gamertag: Private

Writer Christian Donlon Gamertag: Doonvas

Writer Jem Alexander Gamertag: Yembles

Was crushed at Matt’s desecration of his Minecraft world, but was instantly restored by the discovery you can ride pigs. Watch this moment of sheer delight on YouTube at bit.ly/JEJ8om

What with the advances in football game authenticity, Andy now deems any match where West Ham loses to be ‘unrealistic’ in comparison to his FIFA career mode.

Found himself delighted by the co-op hijinks of Fable Heroes. Was less enamoured of Trials Evolution: apparently he is so bad at it we “should probably come round and watch.”

Unmoved by Leveson or the ending of Mass Effect 3, Jem is focused on the bigger problems: how he’s going to use up his Nando’s loyalty card before the design changes and it expires.

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32

“This is the CoD where actions have consequences” 70 When you’re fighting this

lady, you need friends.

62

There’s no tourist info centre in Far Cry 3.

Subscribe and save!

Get OXM delivered to your door, and you can save 23 per cent of the cover price. Plus, subscribe now and you’ll get a free copy of DJ Hero 2 with turntable! Details on page 42.

80 The son of Sparda’s

return edges near.

66 What was number one on your

FIFA 13 wishlist? Kinect, you say?

“Crysis 3’s badass hero is now armed with a bow – but Robin Hood never 58 had anything like this”

Prophet means business in the tree-infested New York of Crysis 3.

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XBOX 360 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE

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Issue 86 June 2012

Contents Dashboard

Expert opinion and comment…

012 Lost Planet 3 If you loved Lost Planet 2, you’ll hate this.

017 Dragon Ball Z You know those spoof ideas people had for Kinect? Well now there’s this.

018 Killer is Dead Suda-51 just won’t stop making games.

020 First Look More details are leaking through about Spock and Kirk’s co-op buddy adventure.

022 Number Cruncher A selection of the month’s most intriguing news numbers.

024 Most Wanted We unload the information shotgun on the games we’re aching to jam into our Xbox.

026 Hot Topic Why settle for one opinion, when you can have two?

Input

Post opinion on your games, your friends and your magazine 028 Letters It’s like being pen pals with a German – without the language barrier.

Features

86 Brilliance that came from

nowhere: Dragon’s Dogma.

The best writers in the industry explore the wider world of Xbox 360 032 Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Treyarch shreds the Call of Duty rulebook.

044 What would Molydeux?

The global game jam that made hundreds of fantasies real.

050 How to be a games tester We chat to the people who strive for the perfect game and reveal how you can get involved.

106 Mob Rule Pre-order extreme!

How crowdsourcing is powering game development.

Previews

Exclusive playtests of the most-wanted Xbox 360 games 058 Crysis 3 062 Far Cry 3 064 Bellator MMA Onslaught 066 FIFA 13 070 Aliens: Colonial Marines 074 Epic Mickey 2 077 Resident Evil 6 078 Port Royale 3 079 Battlefield 3: Close Quarters 080 DmC: Devil May Cry

Reviews

The ultimate buyers' guide – every new Xbox 360 game reviewed!

082 Prototype 2 086 Dragon’s Dogma 089 Sniper Elite V2 090 Fez 094 Fable Heroes 096 Diabolical Pitch 098 Minecraft 101 Anomaly: Warzone Earth 101 Nexuiz 102 Skullgirls 103 The Splatters 103 Shoot Many Robots

On the disc

Your Official Xbox 360 disc has ten demos! Flip the page for more details…

The The eF Fu Fulll 360 360

122 Is Armored Core V

Customise and expand your Xbox 360 gaming with tips, content and great ideas!

112 Dragon’s Dogma Ten things you must do or regret it forever.

114 How To The Easter eggs you might have missed.

116 UEFA Euro 2012 Downloadable computerised football for sale.

118 Indie Games It’s hit and miss, and not in the proportion implied.

120 OXM investigates Are prices really getting higher? Really?

130 Secrets Hidden treats in Syndicate. Doesn’t include ‘fun’.

better online? twitter.com/oxmuk

THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE XBOX 360

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MW3 SALES DROP BEHIND BLACK OPS are clamouring to interpret what the A nalysts sales figures of MW3 mean. After a recordThe sales figures ‘Mortal Kombat: The Next Chapter’: went that way, sir. on sale to the highest bidder.

breaking launch, figures have dropped off more quickly, leaving them around 5% behind Black Ops. Does it mean the formula is tired? Is the push for pre-orders working? Your guess is as good as Michael Pachter’s…

Month in Numbers Team OXM’s antics via the medium of infographics

Office References to…

Dragon’s Dogma

15 20 30 100,000

MANGAANGER

Matt telling Log he should play it Matt telling Mike he should play it Matt telling Jonty he should play it Matt telling the internet they should play it

How we’ve filled our time…

Wringing an extra 5% out of our time-pie

Lobbying for an XBLA Legends of Grimrock

Using pen and paper to crack Fez’s cypher

5% Featuring numbers in excess of 9,000.

20%

30%

Miming The Kamehameha

10%

Dragonball Z Kinect lets you perform the ultimate moves

A

ny cartoon that can make television out of two men-children pulling ever more firing strained faces, and fi ring increasingly massive beams of light at each other for 20 minutes has to win a certain amount of respect, if only for its audacity. However, the games aren’t – how to put this diplomatically? – burdened with a reputation for excellence.

That might be why it’s made the leap to Kinect. With the games growing more and more into repetitive slaps on fans’ faces, a new and hyper-kinetic way to enjoy the equally intense anime could pull it back from the brink. With over 50 characters from the DBZ roster, Kinect options will be available in Story and Score Attack modes.

Story Mode is a first-person deal, with you copying the on-screen moves in a way that sounds as much Dance Central as Dragonball. Score Attack, meanwhile, is simply a series of survival battles for you to war in the leaderboards. According to the press release, Namco’s vice-president of marketing Carlson Choi says “there’s going to be no better feeling in the world”. That’s exactly the kind of optimism that’ll land you a VP job in the marketing department.

The multiplayer will remain tied to controllers, much to the relief of fragile family heirlooms and glass-topped coffee tables everywhere. We’re as suspicious as you are, but let’s keep an open mind here – this could be the nipple-tweak that an increasingly lacklustre franchise sorely needs.

35%

Playing games that came out of MolyJam

Watching celebrities attack on Twitter

What’s been on our Xbox 360 Quarrel

25%

You’ve got to admire a word game that accepts swears

I Am Alive

40%

Playing this has taught us a brand new word, and it is ‘piton’

Fez

35% That’s some good dragon punching, kid. twitter.com/oxmuk

Land some truly impolite punches.

We’re not stopping until we find the secret in the throne room THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE XBOX 360 17

Publisher Sega Developer Gearbox Players 1-8 Co-op 2-4 players

Must buy!

Can’t wait

Looking good Shaping up Needs work

WATCH YOUR BACK

Alien AI is sharp and believable, which means – like the movies – you won’t know they’re around until they’re right on top of you.

Encounters at this range are the norm rather than the exception then, unless you look at your motion tracker more regularly than a teenage boy at his copy of Razzle. It also makes shotguns really useful in multiplayer – just watch out for the hail of acid-blood.

Aliens: Colonial Marines Gearbox extends the Aliens universe

Y

Not even a little bit. Somewhere deep ou probably know Aliens: within Gearbox the coders have Colonial Marines as a produced a very contemporary-looking chance for games bespoke engine, with some bleeding journos to bust out the edge graphical tech in the form of a quips from James deferred lighting system. While you’re Cameron’s genre-defying 1986 walking around the Sulaco, the movie. You might also have surface of LV-426 or anywhere heard it’s a canonical sequel to Release else Colonial Marines will take that movie, and that its sixTBC you, the engine’s rendering the year dev cycle has been long out-of-frame part of that level enough for the darker voices in before you arrive. When you do your head to start whispering: rock up to that pre-rendered area, all “Duke Nukem Forever.” So now the the cogs and pistons inside your Xbox Texas studio is finally dishing out 360 can focus solely on lighting in precious hands-on time with Colonial Marines, what have we learned about real-time. Cue tons of scary silhouettes dancing across walls, realistic light those six years? Is it less of an Alien beams and a metric ton of atmosphere. and more of a dinosaur?

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And that atmosphere is something we got to sample first-hand in the form of Colonial Marines’ 8v8, first to 50 kills team deathmatch in a claustrophobic space station level oddly reminiscent of Rebellion’s 1999 Alien vs Predator.

Pitting marines against aliens, the gameplay’s asymmetrical. The Xeno’s viewpoint is third-person, which both aids quick progression through ventilation shafts, across ceilings and any other sneaky routes on the way to your soldier-buffet, and shows off some fairly ropey and hopefully placeholder Xenomorph movement animations. Your vision’s augmented (again, like AvP) so you can see friends and enemies from afar in a kind of x-ray tint. www.oxm.co.uk

Aliens: Colonial Marines Ma arines

“Hello? Nah mate, I’ve got nothing on me.”

SHOCK IN THE DARK

Xenomorphs can creep up on you from any surface, which takes some getting used to when you’re conditioned to watch out for Russians popping up from behind storage crates and roadblocks. Thanks, modern shooters. The new ‘lurker’ enemy is especially sneaky, and is sure to be a thorn in your side in every badly-lit corridor. So, every corridor then.

“You won’t know an alien’s around until it’s right on top of you”

LV-426: a terrible place for an activities weekend.

Further exploration of the marines’ mothership is promised.

twitter.com/oxmuk

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Yuck, Xeno-breath is never pleasant.

ART DIRECTOR BRIAN COZZENS IS AN ALIENS SUPER-GEEK We hear you’ve even gone so far as to mimic the film stock that the movie used.

This is interesting. So, the stock was experimental – Kodak 5294. As I understand, that stock was chosen mainly because of the exposure, because it was gonna be mainly on dark sets, and it was very grainy.

I actually got in touch with the Kodak labs, and had them send me the specs of that stock, with the curves and graphs of the film itself and we’re working to reproduce those curves in the game. So we can have the same tone and the same contrast in the game like there was in the film.

One of the hardest things for you must be having to show the alien on screen clearly, because in the films that’s such a rarity. How do you approach that challenge?

Not a lot of people think about that, and it never really occurred to me how much of a problem that would be until I started working on the game. [In the films] they always show the top portion of the Xeno. When you see Xeno-feet, they’re not scary-looking.

There’s no way to make Xeno-feet look cool. But we had to change their design a bit to accommodate for that.

In Alien and Aliens, they’re just like a humanoid leg, they go from thigh to calf to foot. But when we saw that in the game, it wasn’t that interesting.

So we made it double-jointed so that we have that extra leeway, we can make creepy double-jointed movements. The other thing that we’ve done is, when the Xenos are attacking in AvP there’s a lot of quadruped movement. Cat-like. But in the films you’re getting a lot of humanoid ‘I’m on both feet’ kinda thing, so we try to go back and forth to keep them scary-looking when they’re moving around.

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LADY KILLER

The Lurker always looks for the sneak attack.

Life’s much simpler as a marine.

Poking out reassuringly in front of you is an iconic pulse rifle, complete with authentic high-pitched burst fire. You also have a motion tracker which uses the original skincrawling beep sounds from the 1986 movie. It’s far from a simple nod to the film, though – constant flipping back and forth between weapon and tracker is vital. It only takes a few dozen sneak attacks from behind to realise that.

What’s really striking about the action, as we trade kills with the Gearbox devs playing as Xenos, is how the game’s mechanics brutally guide both teams into behaving like their movie counterparts.

Marines really do need to watch those corners, stick together, and anything else you might imagine Apone saying. Shotguns really do come in handy for close encounters – along with a brand new weapon we’re given the option to use in the weapon

Facehuggers: violating personal space since 1979.

What kind of canonical sequel would Colonial Marines be without the inclusion of a strong female character? This is Bella, and at the start of the game you see a facehugger scuttle away from her after god knows how long down her throat. She’ll probably be fine though, right? She certainly seems to think so – and that ongoing tragedy is something Gearbox is keen to play on.

loadout screen after each death. It falls somewhere between a pulse rifle and the super-powerful S.M.A.R.T. gun (which comes with an auto-aim function and can only be picked up from hard to reach locations in each level like a Quake railgun).

It’s the first taste we get for the level of creative licensing Gearbox is allowing itself with this game. So far, so safe.

We doubt he’ll be the one to talk fine wine with during down-time.

Large and in charge

Our second taste of Gearbox’s expansion of the Aliens universe is a little more controversial – and a lot smashier. It’s a new alien type called the Charger, which introduces itself by fi filling lling the screen with its triceratops-like form, then pounding it into a pulp of failure and humiliation – much like L4D’s L4D ’s Tank. He spawns every two minutes, turning the tide of what’s otherwise a really close battle – there’s never more than three kills in it as both teams race to 50. The other new alien type we’re treated to (read: callously mutilated by) is the Lurker, a much closer relative than the Charger to the Xenos we’re used to from the movies. His angle is stealth – moving quickly and silently before closing in for the melee kill.

“It’s respectfully authentic to the 1986 Aliens movie” www.oxm.co.uk

Aliens: Colonial Marines

“We’re not going to do anything silly with the franchise”

SMART SHOOTING

Not only does the S.M.A.R.T. gun make that unmistakable hissing sound and come with a HUD overlay that helps you aim, it also has a bandana tied to it, just like Vasquez would have wanted. These are the go-to guns in multiplayer and solo play alike, such is their Xeno-shredding ability. Feedback feels just right, too – it knocks aliens right back out of acid-splashing range.

“We feel really good about showing him off because it’s very important for the fans to know that we’re not going to do anything silly with the franchise,” explains art director Brian Cozzens. “There were a number of action figures that came out in the late ‘80s based on Aliens – the ‘gorilla alien’ and things like that. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s probably a little too cheesy.”

We find find the action figures figures pinned up on a wall in a Gearbox meeting room later that day, clearly beacons of what not to do with the precious Aliens IP. Marines’ multiplayer component Colonial Marines is impressive in that it balances genuine tension and atmosphere with a compulsive and accessible play style – but it’s not the primary focus of the game. The singleplayer campaign is where the studio’s collaboration with illustrious names like Ridley Scott and esteemed concept artist

Syd Mead (of Tron’s light bike and Aliens’ Sulaco fame) has been channelled, and other than promising to uncover secrets and apparent inconsistencies from the movies such as ‘what the hell is that giant space jockey thing in Alien?’ Gearbox is keeping its cards extremely close to its chest (burster).

Alien concept

What was shown in the brief dev-driven demo was a fanatically recreated Sulaco which your marine steps onto just after the events of Aliens, right down to Bishop’s lower half still twitching and spilling robo-milk in the cargo bay, post-queen attack. It’s almost too slender an insight to draw any proper conclusions from, but even in that brief sliver of gameplay the authentic sounds, impressive lighting effects and obsessive attention to detail

LOCK AND LOAD A multiplayer lifespan Staring at the vent the Xeno emerged from to kill you last round, then turning round just as it appears – killing you again.

Firing off grenades to destroy one incoming enemy, then cursing when his friends approach your grenade-less ass.

Buddying up to track the ceilings and corners, before a Xeno drops down from the ceiling and spoils the party.

twitter.com/oxmuk

Macho quipping ahoy!

Marines love a natter.

10%

Watching the motion tracker, realising they’re coming from everywhere, then putting it away again because it’s way too scary.

30%

18%

6% 4% 32%

Finding the S.M.A.R.T. gun, laying waste to a wave of Xenos in one burst, and not cracking a smile ‘cos you’re a badass.

Screaming in sympathetic agony as your marine steps in the acid-spilling carcass of the Xeno you just exploded.

have an effect. Our marine takes some tentative steps around a roughed-up Sulaco before encountering a fellow grunt, encrusted to the wall by Xeno-matter.

As we’re trying to free him a Lurker appears, and the first firefight kicks off to a cinematic score and frenzied marine chatter Hudson would be proud of.

It doesn’t feel new, or emergent. But Colonial Marines does feel respectfully authentic to the 1986 movie. It’s clear that Gearbox isn’t using the Aliens license to make a Call of Duty with facehuggers.

Whether it alienates (sorry) newcomers or not, Colonial Marines has its sights squarely set on exploring one of the most compelling sci-fi universes around. Whether it can gel the new alien types together and avoid the fatigue of the movie’s corridordriven action all takes a backseat to one question – can a game carrying the Aliens name ever meet expectations? If any can, it’s Colonial Marines.

Dan Underwood

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Battlefi Battlefield eld 3: Close Quarters Qua arters Publisher EA Developer DICE Players 1-16 Co-op No

Must buy!

Can’t wait

Looking good Shaping up Needs work

Battlefield 3: Close Quarters After Karkand, it’s time to get intimate

T

claustrophobic contrast to the open he second version of the vastness of Karkand.

Frostbite Engine is We’re allowed to play 20 minutes of spreading like a delicious Conquest Domination – a new Frankenstein algae across the EA mode that’s about as genuinely innovative franchises – Need For Speed used it last year for The Run, and as its hybrid name suggests. It’s more tweaks than anything else, with looser Medal of Honor has made the rubblerespawn points dropping unwise players strewn jump for Warfighter. But while into a nest of angry bullets. its engine is doing the rounds, if there’s One new map is Donya Fortress. one thing belongs to DICE and It sports an Eastern theme, with DICE alone, it’s Battlefield. That Release domed structures obscuring the means it can’t do the annual June horizon from every angle, and cycle of its tag-team competitors 2012 adding to the sense of enclosure.

– it’s just not feasible.

Clean white tiles and pillars soon Instead, it’s focusing on a chain of substantial expansion packs. We’ve already taste the wrong end of Frostbite’s destruction algorithms, and the map flips had Back to Karkand, which gave a Frostbite makeover to popular Battlefield 2 from dazzling sunlight on the balconies and maps. The next on its list is Close Quarters, staircases to dingy, oppressive shade indoors. The intimacy of the map means which will be knifing its way into your life this coming June. Focusing on infantry-only players are everywhere – it’s essential to keep turning and moving. Close Quarters is battles where you “feel the world crashing run-and-gun personified. around you”, the maps included will be a Donya Fortress: an open hub and dark corridors.

A noisy and inefficient substitute for a flashlight. twitter.com/oxmuk

You picked the wrong spawn point, friend.

DICE may not to be able to compete with the release schedule of Infinity Ward and Treyarch’s tag-team Call of Duty offerings, but this long spread of more substantial maps and modes will help to keep Battlefield in our brains. It’s a compromise with benefits – the game’s 14 million players won’t be be split across two different releases.

The next pack, Armored Kill, will arrive in the autumn and focus on bringing a fleet of new vehicles and “all-out” warfare over a range of the biggest ever Battlefield maps. Then finally, there’ll be the secret and mysterious End Game. We don’t have any details about this one yet, but if there are nukes, we’ll have it.

Jon Blyth

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THE FULL 360

How to…

Your guide to getting the best Achievements and in-game extras FIND THREE HIDDEN EASTER EGGS IN MODERN WARFARE 3 DLC

TEDDY TIME The downloadable maps in Modern Warfare 3 each have their own little hidden nods and winks in them. In the recently released Black Box map, head to the big brown condo with the swimming pool outside, then run into the pool and walk right into the corner to see a teddy bear sitting in a rubber ring.

FIND THE SPACE HAMSTER IN MASS EFFECT 3 In ME2 you could buy a space hamster for your room from the souvenir shop in the Citadel.

Your hamster is missing in ME3 but that’s because it’s scuttling around the engineer area where Jack used to live. Head down there and you’ll see the hamster running about. Catch it (it’s hard) and you can put it back into its cage in your room. We love it when a plan comes together, the plan in this case being hamster imprisonment.

THAT’S SO RAVEN Also on the Black Box map, head to the plane that’s crashed in the building, stand alongside its wing and face the building.

Walk forward and enter the little side door in front of you to get into the building, then head up the stairs to find a photo featuring four members of the Raven Software team.

FIND THE CHEEKY 300 GRAFFITI IN GOTHAM CITY IMPOSTORS

CLUCKING HELL Our favourite of the lot, though, is in the Overwatch map and can only be seen while you’re spectating. Move the camera into the air and direct it to the big crane, where you’ll find a chicken behind the controls. There’s no explanation for it, but we don’t care. It’s a chicken driving a crane, and we’re happy with that.

“Direct the camera to the big crane and you’ll find a chicken behind the controls” UNCOVER SHADOWLOO PARK IN STREET FIGHTER X TEKKEN

There are more 300 references in gaming than there were people in the Spartan army, but this is one of our favourites so far. Play in any game mode and load up the Ace Chemical stage. Inside one of the warehouse-type areas, directly across from a big red column is a small table. Above the table is a poster informing people not to push others into the chemical tanks, but there are a few modifications...

SEE REMEDY’S FIRST GAME IN ALAN WAKE’S AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

It seems someone at Capcom Park, is a fan of Jurassic Park because the Jurassic Era Research Facility stage pays even more homage to Spielberg’s dino fl icks than you flicks may fi rst think. When you play first the second round on this stage you’ll see a truck in the background and a jeep on the right. It’s hard to spot on the truck but move all the way to right and you’ll see a Shadowloo Park logo, just like the Jurassic Park one, on the side of the jeep.

Play the chapter Drive-In I: The Curator until you reach the projector building. In there you’ll find an arcade version of Death Rally – Remedy’s first game released back in 1996. You can’t play it, but you can see it in action if you press B near it. Coincidentally, Death Rally was just re-released on iOS, with Barry Wheeler from Alan Wake added as an opponent.

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THE FULL 360

Secrets of...

Syndicate

Pub Dev Score

EA Starbreeze Studios 6/10

We use our cranial DART chipset to delve into Starbreeze’s mind

W

ith a sinister raised hand to the cleverest part of our brain, we felt a familiar warm buzz as we extrapolated information from two of Starbreeze’s finest. Art director Nicholas Siren and senior co-op level designer Andreas Gschwari were powerless to fight our every whim, as we stole vital corporate details.

It’s well-known that Starbreeze habitually puts its employees into its games, so is this the case with Syndicate?? “There are plenty of Starbreeze developers Syndicate!” laughs walking around in the world of Syndicate!”

Siren. “They range from the security guard standing in front of the ‘Agent Operation’ entrance, to some of the hobos located in the Downzone levels.”

References to the original Syndicate are everywhere, but sometimes you have to look find them. “A few closely to find do go a little more unnoticed, like some of the Downzone commercials,” says Siren.

“Various lamp and car designs are extrapolated directly from the original games, while a co-op character’s red hair is a homage to one of the original game’s agents.” Gotta love those retro redheads.

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Whenever you come across an employee locker in Syndicate, the name daubed on the front of it is that of a developer from the team at Starbreeze.

At one stage during the game’s development, Persuade and Suicide mind breaches worked in the co-op mode. However, the former unbalanced the game and the latter was found to remove a lot of the fun. “Suicide would have worked on Reactives,” explains Gschwari. “I’ll admit that it was fun watching them kill themselves with a minigun…”

The way that co-op players scream, “I need a reboot!” when they’ve been shot to pieces is a deliberate reference to the fact that the game is a reboot of the Syndicate series. What pranksters…

In early builds of the game, breaching wasn’t so much directed at enemy minds, as enemy installations. You could, for example, breach hidden gas pipes to create explosions.

“Another example would be from one of our Downzone levels,” adds Siren. “There you could breach the controls of a big magnetic crane and dump big chunks of metal on enemies hidden behind cover.”

There were plenty of moments nal that didn’t make it into the fi final cut of game – including ‘jet pack dude’ enemies and a battle against a white Rapina Dropship in the La Ballena level. “We had a really cool scenario in one of our Aspari levels with big rotating fans that you were supposed to control,” explains Siren.

“You were going to suck enemies into them with a big gibbing explosion as the payoff…”

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