For a game set in the future, EA's rebooted Syndicate is a game very much trapped by the past.

At an instinctive level, that's because it's an all-action first-person shooter reboot of a 1993 game that was all about top-down strategy. At times you can feel the game creaking as it tries to keep one foot in a world created almost 20 years ago and the other in the modern shooter space. But Syndicate is also a game hemmed in by the standards of the FPS genre, which are themselves showing considerable strain after years of overuse. With such ambitious exercises as Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness to its credit, Swedish studio Starbreeze would seem to be the perfect choice to inject some mutant DNA into the genre, but Syndicate is sadly the developer's most anonymous and generic work thus far.

Part of the problem is that, in accordance with accepted FPS thinking, the game has been cleaved down the middle and separated into single- and multiplayer chunks. It's a decision that leaves the former feeling predictable and perfunctory and the latter (a co-op campaign) frustratingly underdeveloped. Had the two been combined with the flair that Starbreeze has exhibited in the past, Syndicate could have been quite special. As it is, it's dependable enough, but hardly interesting.

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