Synapse PSVR 2 Review – Brainy Brilliance

nDreams, the developer of the latest first-person shooter to hit the PSVR 2, also happens to have developed one of my favorite—second only to Firewall Zero Hour—first-person shooters for the original PSVR. If you’re a die-hard PSVR player such as I am, you’ll be intimately familiar with Fracked—the frenetic first-person shoot-em-up released as part of the PSVR’s twilight years. It was a banger of a game, and an easy recommendation, even if it did have to contend with the dodgy light-based PS Move wand controllers. I can’t fault it very much. Granted, while I’ve not been back inside the world of Fracked since reviewing it—I’m a busy man, I hop between a lot of games—I was immediately taken back to those opening moments once Synapse, the mind-bending PSVR 2 shooter, opened up its neural pathways and allowed me to delve deep into its psyche.

Obviously, developers carry a lot over from one game to the next, often as part of established franchises. There’s a reason Basim will stab people with a hidden blade in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and you can thank Altair’s original graywashed adventure from 2007 for that. But the same rings true for Synapse, a brand-new game detached from anything developer nDreams have previously done. Yet, it still pulls its past to the foreground—a reminder of what the developer has previously achieved, while also being a bold “we’ve done this before, but here’s something new” kind of statement. And it really is.

Taking the grab-and-cover mechanic that made Fracked such a playable mess—it really had no right working on PSVR as well as it did, if we’re all being honest—and surrounding it with basically the wish list of any VR shooter player, nDreams has crafted a well-thought-out single-player shooter that sits streets ahead of anything else currently out there. It’s a bit daft when you tug at the logic, sure, but story nonsense aside, it’s as robust as they come, though not completely without its own form of brain fog.

The story goes—I think; I will be 100% with you and say that the story didn’t grab me at all and Metal Gear Solid’s David Hayter was wasted upon my uncultured brain—that some high-ranking army dude is strapped into an Animus-like machine and your job is to jump in there, Inception-style, and fight your way through his subconscious to get the information needed to “save the world.” That’s how every run starts, with a floating note stating what your mission is.

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Again, I didn’t really care for the story. It was more background noise to the sound of bullets whizzing and baddies being blown up. Without proper cutscenes, a big bad boss with an eye patch (or any other kind of physical ailment, I’m not fussy), and a double-crossing damsel in distress (not looking at you, my precious ex…) then I’m not interested. Yes, I’m what the kids call a “basic bitch.” I don’t mind, because Synapse is anything but, and for me to be a part of its bleak world is a privilege.

Basically, your job is to infiltrate some fella’s mind. The game starts out with the loving colors of a seaside sunset before you head into a typical spec-ops compound. You know the drill. Laptops scattered about. Minimal decor. Zero classy elevator music. You make your way through while Miss Generic Lady In Your Ear drops some exposition which is quickly forgotten, and then you’re dropped into your first tutorial mission where you get to play around with a gun, then you get a taste of telekinesis, which—despite being fairly simple—blew my fairly simple mind away with its use of the PSVR 2’s eye-tracking capabilities. I was floored. Almost. I’m sure if my jeans didn’t create so much friction with the expensive fabric couch (thanks, precious ex!) I’d have slipped out of my seat and fallen straight into a Star Wars fantasy. You look at an object, and the game highlights it. You press L2 on your VR controller, and you’re wielding that object as if you’ve been force-fed the force since birth.

No word of a lie—I spent a good 10 minutes on the intro tutorial just pissing around with the telekinesis, exclaiming to a room of fruit flies (it’s summer, they happen) and carefully lined LEGO men in front of my TV (I have a boy, it happens) that nobody will mess with me and my new Empire! Little did I know that this was just the beginning—I hadn’t even scratched the dura mater yet.

Then the game set me free. Pistol in one hand, Anakin’s hate in the other, and… I died quite quickly. I was overrun by baddies and I had waved away the tutorial messages as Padawan bullcrap that I didn’t need. Puh-lease. I’ve been gaming for over two decades, I don’t nee- well, actually, turns out I do. I thought I had the power to fling baddies around from my first run. That wasn’t the case., I thought I could crush explosive barrels from my first run. That wasn’t the case. I thought I could launch deadly pro—you get my bloody point. I didn’t pay enough attention. So when the game kicked me back to its starting area, I was all eyes. Literally.

Reading the in-mission tasks is all done with eye movements. Checking out the upgrades is also done with eye movements. And reading the basic instructions… is also done with one’s eyes. That’s when it hit me: I’m playing a roguelike and I should expect to fail often and not let it bite my ego too much. So off I went, galavanting around the grayscale levels, grabbing cover, throwing literal mind blocks at bad guys, and shooting them up like the good ol’ action movie heroes of the 80s. I am not yet too old for this… excrement! It was fun, except for the occasional Miss Generic Lady In Your Ear dropping more exposition that I just didn’t care for. Clam up, lady, and get me back to shooting.

50 or so deaths later and I had this thing Groundhog Day’d to hell, and that’s a half-and-half compliment to the game. On the one hand, I was able to learn the levels and their layouts. I knew roughly where the barrels would be, where the bad guys would begin their spawn, and which locations hosted the upgrades, weapons, and health—even against the monotonous gray levels. On the other, it kind of made everything a bit too predictable. It meant I knew when a mini-boss would come barreling at me. I knew when the tell-tale shrieks of the kamikaze soldiers and where they’d come from. And, most of all, with enough powerups bought and paid for, I knew I was basically untouchable after a dozen hours in, and that the only thing that would get me killed would be my own idiocy, or one of those fruit flies appearing inside my goggles, which did happen, by the way.

Synapse excels at being a power trip, but I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly memorable one, and that’s due in large part to the way it’s presented. The opening sequence, full of color, becomes a faded, distant memory as you play out run after run inside the game’s grayscale world, with only a few shades of purple and orange punctuating the drab design. I literally felt starved of color, so much so that when I hit the home button to take a break, my PS5’s home screen felt like an otherworldly experience. Taking the headset off and looking around my living room was almost like waking from a vivid dream. Was that the point? Was that the reason behind the design? I don’t know, but it certainly didn’t encourage me to go back into Synapse’s limbo-like landscapes. What did pull me back was the gameplay, and I can’t fault the developer on this front—it’s exceptional. Wielding a weapon—pistol, shotgun, or machine pistol—in one hand and the Force minus Disney’s approval in the other is a thrill ride, and while it’s easy to learn the pitter-patter of the game, it’s hard to not be impressed with how it comes together. I would have liked a bit more color, sure, but I’d have also liked a bit more content. Once you’ve made your run through to the end—which does take a few hours of playing, failing, learning, and improving—there’s not much reason to do it all again, especially if you’ve got a backlog that needs working through, something I’m particularly guilty of.

If it’s a single-player experience with a lot of playable hours that you’re after, Synapse is one of the best PSVR 2 releases out there. It’s not particularly deep, and it shows its hand early on, but it’s still an immensely fun power trip and a great addition to any and all PSVR 2 libraries. It just doesn’t need as much gray matter as it claims.

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