Brain candy: first impressions of Frozen Synapse Beta

My first couple of days with the Frozen Synapse Mac beta have actually been rather charming. For the uninitiated, Frozen Synapse is a turn-based tactical game under development by Mode 7. The premise involves short, curt shootouts by a handful of units per side. The game’s classes are simply extensions of their weapons: machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and grenade launcher.

For the most part, each game lasts a handful of rounds, and each round spans exactly five seconds of play. In a typical game, the player plots his moves by way of a command interface. He submits these moves to a remote server (if multiplayer), or he does this locally when playing the AI. The computer then resolves each opponent’s moves and, consequentially, displays the results on-screen. As a player, you watch the results, collect data on casualties and projected enemy positions, and then ponder on how best to direct your units for the next five seconds of the game.

Most of the gameplay of course resides within plotting your moves. The action is simply historical, and it serves to provide you with data more so than wanton entertainment. A typical game will last, say, ten to fifteen minutes of real-world time. Since you have no control over your units once a turn is submitted, Frozen Synapse plays a bit like Flashpoint Germany or Solium Infernum or even Dominions 3, but on a micro-scale of three to five men and without all the diplomacy and researching that goes with the latter two. You watch the history of a turn, which provides volumes of tactical data. You then use your brain to predict what your enemy will do next. That’s the gameplay. For all intents and purposes, I call this brain candy.

From my experience, the single-player missions suffer from an openly aggressive AI, allowing the player to act defensively and mop the floor with a broad, clumsy hand. Multiplayer, though, is where the action resides. I’ve spent several late nights playing a handful of simultaneous games, which Frozen Synapse‘s menu design seems to openly encourage. The menu can be somewhat unclear with how it displays lobby information and historical game data, but Frozen Synapse readily wants you to play several games simultaneously, and it juggles the management of these turns for you, allowing consecutive bouts of entertainment when an opposing player takes too long to submit his next turn. All in all, there’s an elegant system underneath the edges of this beta.

The multiplayer experience can be broadly categorized into two styles of information: light and dark. In light, enemy positions are always known. In dark, you see only the enemies that your units can see. This latter mode shows ghost images of enemies who leave all friendly lines of sight. It displays a time-stamp to indicate the length of their absence, which allows you to project where your enemies hide. During your planning, you can move and issue orders to these ghost images for the sake of hypothetical turn resolutions. When you analyze several possible outcomes, you naturally make adjustments to your tactics based on the likelihood of enemy movement. The act of resolving these hypotheticals is both the most consumptive and addictive element of Frozen Synapse’s gameplay.

You may play each of the game’s multiplayer modes—extermination (which is death-match), secure (attack-defend), disputed (resource gathering), and hostage—through either light or dark styles.  Once you complete a game you can watch a full replay without the dark style’s fog of war. Here’s a video of one of my most recent “dark extermination” matches. For the purpose of this writing I recorded the game through Screenflow rather than Frozen Synapse’s export video feature, which seamlessly connects all moves together (and which occasionally loses sound on my machine). I want to represent the game’s sense of timing. As far as I can see, a player must develop his sense of timing, player prediction, and slight-of-hand to feel accomplished in this game. Note that I couldn’t see my two left-most enemies for a majority of the game. I knew their general location because of their starting positions and my one brief sighting of his machine gunner. And because his sniper squatted beneath a window, my shotgunner couldn’t see him even though my unit was both facing him and within range.

I like Frozen Synapse’s simplistic visuals, though I do find its simplicity somewhat dispassionate. On one side it’s fitting because the game focuses on cold, unemotional tactics. On the other side, though, I can walk away from the game because I feel rather detached. I don’t wholly agree with the idea that it’s visual presentation is a personality. I do like it, but its face is rather mechanistic and impersonal in nature, which makes its aesthetics more an extension of utility rather than a congenial characteristic.

I’ve played only small amounts of Darwinia, but I do see the connection between it (as well as Introversion’s other retro-looking game, Defcon) and Frozen Synapse’s presentation. Much of Darwinia’s personality exudes from the environment, particularly the contours of its land. In Frozen Synapse the environment is assuredly static—at least in personality; but it’s destructible, which makes for engrossing play and begs you to be a flexible tactician.

I see Frozen Synapse as a testbed for close quarters tactics. It’s like a training simulator because it’s distant and rather unforgiving. I like the hell out of it, particularly for how well it handles multiple gaming sessions. Presently, it’s getting more play than any other game on my Mac.