Synced: Off Planet

The cyborg horde is your ally in Tencent’s undead blaster

- 

Made up of veterans of Epic and Ubisoft together with newcomers from the broader tech industry, Tencent’s youthful Next Studios has worked on a wide variety of projects in a handful of years – from mazy Roguelikes through noir detective fables to prototype, Milo-and-Katestyle AI avatars. A collaboration with UK-based Studio Gobo, Synced is the grandest but most generic-feeling of the lot, an open-world survival shooter in which players battle cyborg zombies (here known as Nanos) in the glossy ruins of a future Earth. This is zombiebothering with a twist, however, as Tencent’s senior game operations manager Vladislav Perge insists. By grabbing ‘sync nodes’ dropped by some cyborgs, you can mass-hack hordes and turn them into allies. “We really want to give you a world where everything is connected, everything is in the same network, and you are able to use enemies as weapons,” he says.

It’s an idea familiar from titles such as Left 4 Dead 2, with its jars of swarm-attracting Boomer bile, but Next is aiming for a relatively elaborate implementation of the concept, with four or five breeds of Nano to meddle with and an emphasis on using such crowd-control tactics to overcome disadvantages in PvP.