Frozen Synapse may look simple, but it’s a powerful tactical combat simulator. Players control remote humaniod combat units called nodes, as they fight it out across a variety of random level types. In every level, single player and multi, the levels and the unit placements are random, lending all modes of the game high replayability, and making the single-line player missions less frustrating, since failure still means a new random level to try.
The gameplay is an infrequently seen realtime-turns style. Both players get a planning phase each round, then the battle progresses five seconds with those plans before going back to a planning phase. If you add up all the actual action, each mission only takes about thirty seconds to a minute. Afterwards, any mission can be exported as a video.
Here’s a video of one of my games against a random player I was matched up with on one of the multiplayer servers. It was created by simply putting in my Youtube username and password at the end of the match:
The graphics are a rather simplistic, TRONesque, high-visibility style, but this works toward making the game more robust. Without the distraction of detailed or colorful scenery or meaningless extra props, we’re left with only the pure tactical environment.
The walls and other obstacles are random each map, and everything is destructible with enough force.
The graphics are not ugly however—they have a certain pleasing style—and as an added bonus, they are customizable. If you would rather see purple good guys and yellow bad guys on a green background, so be it. One qualifier: The screenshots to not do the graphics justice. When you first see them, they looks a bit bland, but the effect of the style once animated is much different. The first thing I said when I opened the first tutorial level was “Wow, this looks a lot cooler than the screenshots.”
I played with these colors for a bit before switching back to default.
Speaking of the tutorial, it’s comprehensive and does a good job of introducing all the elements one needs to play, but it is a little annoying as they decided to go with the ‘snarky know-it-all’ style character for the teacher. You get to know this character better through the actual plot, and his snarkyness becomes endearing, but during the tutorial, I just wanted to punch him.
That story is unexpectedly interesting. The player starts as an unwilling tactical operative for a disgruntled former employee of a Microsoft-esque megacorp. The story that reveals itself through the missions is engaging, and the characters are compelling.
Where the game really shines, however, is in multi-player. The matchmaking works well and the turn system is extremely flexible. Because of the turn style, players can take their turns at any pace they desire. No need to even choose a turn style before the game. Each player takes their turn and submits it as they finish it, whether that’s a few minutes to a turn or a few days. One may even play several games at one, easily switching among them as turns become available. If you’re not logged in when a new turn is ready, the server will send an email off to you to let you know.
The beginning of a new multiplayer match. Note that anytime someone else on the server is looking for a public game, it lets everyone else know about it down in the lower left corner.
I’ve found that what works best for me is to start a dozen games or so, and just log in once or twice a day to take my turns. Each game is only eight turns or so on average, so they don’t take long to finish, and if your opponent flakes, you don’t lose too much time investment.
I had a couple of issues with the program, but they’re mostly inconsequential. First, I found that the program does not play well with task switching because it doesn’t seem to give up the screen when requested. This wasn’t an issue in windowed mode however, so I just left it windowed after that discovery. Second, it had a bit of delay in loading for the more complicated singleplayer levels. It never happened in the multiplayer games, where there are no more than ten figures on the battlefield at once, but in the singleplayer campaign there were sometimes as many as forty figures. In these levels, the between-turn calculations were sometimes over a minute.
Overall, the game is flexible, visually appealing, compelling, and fun to get on board with. The learning curve is small, and the replayability is high. Anyone who enjoys tactics games should pick up this novel title.
Frozen Synapse is available now directly through Steam for $24.99, for both Mac and PC.
Articles RSS