Frozen Synapse Prime

Frozen Synapse Prime’s gameplay solely bases itself on committing to a plan and watching it fold out. You set up your troop’s movements, actions or lack thereof and end your turn, also known as “Priming” your turn. The enemy AI/player then primes their turn and an outcome is shown. This is where you’ll see your troops kick ass and take names, or have their names taken, and you guessed it, their asses kicked. If you make a mistake it can cost you one or all of your guys. The difficulty of Frozen Synapse Prime is unforgiving but fair, however I did notice that enemy AI tends to follow the same pattern every retry. You can study these patterns post-mission as whether you lost or won, can view a replay or the game seamlessly, allowing yourself to find where you messed up or the enemy got the upper hand. While enemy patterns can be understood in missions where you are protecting an area or escorting a VIP, in a straight up kill all enemies in the area type-mission, it can feel a little less dynamic. While games like X-COM: Enemy Unknown simplify the concept of turn based combat to area of effects, cover dependency and dice rolls, Frozen Synapse Prime offers a wide variety of actions each soldier can do. You can queue up multiple pathways with different actions, such as making your guy sweep by every room for enemies as he runs through a hall. You can save a guy who was about to return fire at a sniper by telling him to ignore any enemies he sees, duck behind cover, wait for the sniper’s shot to miss and run to safety while the sniper takes the time he needs to line up the shot. It’s that level of control you can have over your soldiers that isn’t left to a dice roll like other turn based games that gives Frozen Synapse Prime its own feel of complete control over every situation. The game offers multiplayer and offline skirmish options that actually have a nice twist. To compare the infrastructure to another game, think the way mobile games offer the ability to come back to the game to take your turn. Frozen Synapse Prime has that feature, which is a thing I don’t think I’ve seen on the Vita before. It’s nice to be able to create a match, take your turn, and wait for an opponent to join and take their first one too. The game lets you know if you have any games waiting for your turn, allows you to find games, select quick match or just create a game and take your first turn in a randomly generated map with balanced squads of up to 4v4. When creating games, you can adjust things like map size, shape, whether or not enemy soldiers will have to be in line of sight of your soldiers to be visible to the player and turn limits. You can set how what soldiers your opponents will use, which hopefully everyone will be nice and mirror squads so everyone can be on the same page. With that in mind, each class is fairly balanced. Even putting a group of snipers up against a group of shotgunners will put both players at disadvantages. For aesthetics, Frozen Synapse Prime is a welcomed change in colour palette and visuals. The change from the dark, deep blue environments of Frozen Synapse on the PC to the stark white polished steel look of Frozen Synapse Prime is stunning, especially on a handheld. The framerate can get a little hitchy at times with things like explosions or panning across the map when multiple things are going on, but nothing that really draws from the experience. While the gameplay I’ve shot off of my camera might not do the game’s visuals justice, here are some screenshots I’ve taken, along with a gallery of screenshots I’ve included in the description of the video. The soundtrack to Frozen Synapse on the PC was stunning, and with the port to the Vita, Nervous_Testpilot’s work is still great to hear. I recommend picking up the soundtrack, whether in the bundle at a small discount or separately, there’s some seriously good stuff in there if you like anything electronic. Frozen Synapse Prime is a great example of how a remake is supposed to be done.

Complete fraud. The game is PBEM by nature, but has no method whatsoever of notifying you that your turn is up, without actually loading into the game. Multiplayer is dead. Additionally it also has serious performance issues even if you care to only play the single player. Just get the PC version. It is better in every way.