Synapse – Pure power fantasy that epitomizes all that’s great about virtual reality

It starts with pulling the trigger and flicking my left wrist. What had once been an enemy pointing a gun in my direction was now a clearing. I looked up at it as it arced through the air, where I grabbed it with my telekinesis and slammed it to the ground below, crashing against jagged, monochromatic rock. into digital fragments.

After spotting a group of enemies hiding behind cover, I used telekinesis to lift an explosive barrel over their heads. Then, as soon as I clenched my fist, the barrel exploded, sending rocks and corpses flying in all directions.

Then, with a submachine gun in my right hand, I used my psychic powers to grab a flying Sentinel enemy out of the air, pin it to the floor, and fire bullets into its body until it exploded and melted.

I feel like Darth Vader at the end of Rogue One. I felt unstoppable, I felt superhuman, but I had no sense of the enemies I was crushing. It’s pure power fantasy. That’s what VR is all about. This is the synapse.

Developer nDreams has built a reputation in the VR space for creating imaginative and highly polished virtual reality games, and its latest release, Synapse, feels like the culmination of everything the studio has learned so far.

The premise of Synapse is simple: you’re a secret agent tasked with breaking into the mind of a rogue colonel (played by David Hayter) to uncover and ultimately stop his plans for some kind of devastating terrorist attack. Your trainer (Jennifer Hale) accompanies you through a communicator deep into the subconscious of a sleeping human, and as you progress through the game, these two disembodied voices bicker and taunt each other, and you slowly catch them doing so motivation.

It’s a decent sci-fi espionage story, with some added intrigue throughout, but its twists and turns are predictable. In fact, this narrative is only there to add some direction to the substance of the game, which is an extremely exciting amalgam of firepower and psychic powers. But, of course, you don’t start with all the powers, some powers need to be learned and earned, and you can accomplish small objectives or “revelations” by jumping into the colonel’s head again and again, as they are called. Completing these apocalypses will earn you points, which you can buy upgrades at the end of each run, successful or not, in very basic roguelike fashion.

These upgrades include new guns, health fonts appearing in certain locations, and more health and ammo capacity, among other things. However, the most notable star of the show is the telekinesis ability. What you can do with them is pretty limited at first–you can throw boxes, or what the game calls psych blocks, or you can explode barrels for some lovely splash damage. Upgrades give you more flexibility, though, and soon you’ll be able to roll objects in and out, use them to hit enemies with more precision, and most importantly, pull enemies up from where they’re standing and Throw them in the air, or simply hold them against a wall until they fail.

Thanks to PSVR2’s eye-tracking capabilities, selecting the object you want to teleport to capture feels intuitive. Most other PSVR2 games I’ve seen limit eye tracking to foveated rendering, or maybe a fancy way of navigating menus, but as a PSVR2 exclusive, Synapse takes advantage of everything the Sony headset has to offer and leverages Eye tracking is impeccable.

Any interactive object you see directly is highlighted instantly, and once there, whoosh, you can throw it or explode it, or – hell! – You can even play with the gun a little bit before firing it. Doing so felt natural and almost flawless at first. On the harder difficulty levels and hordes of enemies, I occasionally struggled through the din to grab what I wanted, but it certainly didn’t break the game.

Every aspect of Synapse seems to have been fine-tuned to make everything you do in it feel effortlessly cool. The weapons are fairly bland, there are four of them, a pistol, a shotgun, a submachine gun, and a grenade launcher, but the way they’re implemented is genius. Unlike the surreal reloads you see in games like Pavlov, the action here is reduced to button presses and offhand swipes.

This might seem a bit too simple for helmet players who prefer realistic military sims, but in Synapse, this simplified reload mechanic lets you focus on maximizing your psionic attacks. Throwing enemies into the air and linking them together with headshots as they fall is a “chef’s kiss” moment, while psychically catching a thrown grenade in mid-air and returning it to the sender for Getting instant karma is delightful trolling.

The fact that you can also do all of this sitting down means that all this tossing is far less intense than it sounds. Obviously, you can also play standing up, but I felt very comfortable playing the entire game sitting down, and I rarely felt fatigued, even after a two-hour long run. In addition to all the standard comfort settings you’d expect from VR gaming these days (aside from teleporting motion – new VR adopters beware!), there are headset and controller haptics, but they’re pretty tame and only available if you’re using ’ when it really stands out. Shot in the face with a minigun.

The visuals are pretty gorgeous, too, with most of the action taking place in monochromatic environments, occasionally illuminated by stylish colors that denote points of interest or objects with which you can mentally interact. It all looked fantastic through the PSVR2’s 4K HDR footage, and I barely noticed the much-maligned mura effect that internet reviewers complained about during the headset’s release window.

By the way, for those who care about such things, Synapse has been redesigned to run at 120hz instead of the native 90hz. This fact made no sense to me until I googled it, and honestly, even after knowing what it meant, I still couldn’t tell from playing the game that any rendered frames were artificial. In my opinion, the game runs very smoothly, and I never encountered any visual anomalies that prevented me from enjoying the game.

As much as I love playing with Synapse, it really isn’t perfect. Like nDreams’ previous VR shooter, Fracked, Synapse is fairly short, even requiring multiple full runs to complete the story. It’s nowhere near as short as Fracked, which had an unbelievable run time of around 2 hours, but according to my PS5, I still fully finished the Synapse story within 8 hours of starting the game and got Platinum trophy.

Of course, being good enough that you wish the experience lasted longer isn’t the game’s worst problem, but even with Synapse’s roguelike randomness, you’ll start to notice a serious lack of variety in gameplay the second you run it. For example, there are only four enemy types, and while they’re slow to introduce, once you’ve fought each of them a few times, you’ll quickly discover that they have easily exploitable weaknesses that make them all Pretty easy to kill.

Over time, the mental plane itself has become all too familiar. While it’s true that Synapse’s gameplay is closer to Rogue-like than anything else, its levels aren’t procedurally generated, a feature you’d typically expect to see in a game of this type. Instead, each level is a pre-made arena with several randomly generated points that, at least at the start of the game, do a good job of tricking you into thinking they’re more varied than they really are. After a long playthrough, though, you do start to recognize familiar spots and learn how each area is laid out in turn, which ultimately takes away from the game’s uniqueness.

This is especially true for the “memory gate” level that marks the midpoint and end point of each run. The levels are more linear than others, so it’s easy to get used to and find a favorite route while playing them. To me, it’s a departure from the experimental arena-style combat that makes the game feel so intoxicating in the first place, and instead they don’t feel like an organic adventure after multiple mind-gate levels , but more like ticking off a checklist.

Finally, there is telekinesis itself. Ultimately, they’re the source of nearly all the fun in the game, and I had an absolutely insane amount of time using them, but it does get to a point where you can become a little too powerful. Running on the harder difficulty levels does throw stronger, more accurate enemies at you with a higher frequency, however, once you get the hang of the mechanics and unlock the ability to lift and throw enemies, you’ll feel like you’re Just hang around and swat flies instead of wading through dangerous battlefields.

Even with these hiccups, however, the sandbox approach still offers more replayability than a standard short VR experience, allowing you to use your powers and weapons. If you’re anything like me, Synapse is one game that you pick up and play and never put down until you’ve gotten everything you can from it.

I’ve played a lot of games with Force-like telepathic abilities on a flat screen, but there’s a sense of magic and a sense of “presence” that only VR can provide. This believability, this almost tangible way for you to interact with the world around you, shatters those childish Jedi dreams, which in turn makes Synapse a must-buy game worth playing for anyone with a PSVR2.

To view this content, please enable targeting cookies.

iGamesNews