Frozen Synapse First Impressions

This is one of the coolest things I’ve played in ages.

Frozen Synapse is a minimalist sort-of turn based indie combat simulator. Both sides give their soldiers orders, once all the orders have been collected the next slice of action unfolds in real time. You do battle across a variety of modes that see you protecting hostages, collecting boxes or just killing each other to death. It’s great.

There’s no overarching strategy here, no base building or resource gathering, just pure, ruthless tactics. Frozen Synapse throws your faceless neon soldiers into a war of firing lines and sight cones in small glowing arenas. Giving orders to your soldiers is effortless thanks to a superb interface. You assign each soldier a series of waypoints, at each of these waypoints you can adjust your soldier’s line of sight, make him duck or leg it as fast as possible, ignoring all other threats as he dashes to cover. After ten minutes of experimenting you’ll tailoring complex paths for your soldiers, adjusting sight lines and mastering the small neon blue arenas with ease.

You can set the precise parameters of each encounter, but the best way to play is to leap into a map and let the game randomly generate the scenery, soldiers and spawn positions for you. A typical encounter will take about five turns, which boils down to 25 seconds of real-time combat. Factor in the time you’ll spend tweaking your orders and trying to predict the enemy’s movements and your average scrap will take about ten minutes, giving you incredibly addictive cranial workouts in bitesize chunks.

The game’s still in beta, and the randomisation has led to some terribly unfair spawn positions and weapon load-outs for some players. This has been largely fixed by a few tweaks that stop players from spawning in line of sight to each other (the bug where you spawn in a tiny box from which there is no escape has also been fixed). Thankfully, though, some of that unfairness has been left in. A lot of the fun of Frozen Synapse lies in using your guile to get yourself out of sticky situations. Sometimes the game will dump you in a small, exposed room in the middle of the map with lots of space outside and enemy snipers with views of the exits, but perhaps you have a rocket launcher, perhaps you can slot a rocket through that improbably angle, blow that piece of cover to smithereens killing the sniper behind it, escaping from the now uncovered exit. Even if you fail the game’s over in minutes and you’re on to your next challenge.

It reminds me of Company of Heroes, of the moments in that game when your forces actually meet the enemy. The moment when a tank rolls into a square and you rush to move your air dropped AT gun into place, moving machine gunners into a nearby house, dragging their firing cone into the nearby street to cover enemy infantry advances. If they’d have used this shit to teach me geometry at school I’d be a mathematician today. As it is Frozen Synapse distils these small, action packed encounters into a beautifully abstract boardgame. Your pieces live and die in a pulsing, tron-like world of tracer fire and neon blood spatters where the only real consequence is the result’s effect on your overall win-loss rating, represented as it is on a worldwide leaderboard.

Frozen Synapse follows Audiosurf, Trackmania and many others in having global and daily leaderboards that update after every single result. Your win tally varies precisely depending on how well you won your last encounter. If it was close you won’t score much, but if you unleashed the crush then you’ll be walking away with a hefty points reward. Conversely your losses will detract from your overall score. If you get your ass kicked you can tumble about 50 places on the leaderboards. This, like the super-slick Youtube upload feature (see the embedded vids) is brilliantly implemented and horribly, horribly addictive.

It hasn’t been released properly yet so there’s no singleplayer campaign playable in the beta, though there will be on release. I’ll certainly be revisiting this when it’s out, meanwhile if you’re on the beta feel free to challenge me to a game. Search for Ludo and send me a challenge.

See you on the battlefield.