Syndicate



Syndicate is an Action/Strategy hybrid developed by Bullfrog and released in 1993 for the Amiga and IBM PC. A RPG/FPS Reboot was made in 2012 by Starbreeze Studios and Electronic Arts (Game Details below).

A short description for this game could be: World domination simulation.

Syndicate had for its time impressive graphics, environments, AI, and game play freedom. It is notable as an early example of a video game Villain Protagonist, and its portrayal of evil acts while totally lacking karmic or moral punishments. It is now available at GOG.com if you still have yet to pick it up.

Setting:
In a dystopian future the world is controlled by powerful syndicates ruling it through the police and military. The vast majority of the population just takes it because they spend much of their time on the cybernetic equivalent of happy pills. You take the role of the evil overlord of one of these syndicates and control a team of cyborg killing machines, or as you call them agents, that follow your every command in a quest to achieve complete world dominance.

Game play:
This can be separated into two parts. The first is the world view where you plan out your nefarious schemes. Here you outfit your team, allocate resources to research to get better equipment, acquire intelligence, and choose the next territory to take over. Taking over a territory means performing a mission.

The second part is the tactical view where you actually do the mission by controlling your team of up to 4 agents. The tactical view sports an isometric view and some pretty impressive (for the time) environments: cities, army bases, secret research facilities etc. that are convincingly "alive", busy streets have people and cars going about their business, trains that can be ridden, cars that can be driven, army bases have drilling soldiers and so on. These environments also react convincingly to your actions with civilians running away from your agents when they draw their weapons, police trying to stop them, and Stuff Blowing Up when they shoot it.

Your agents can carry quite a lot of equipment like miniguns, uzis, med-kits, rocket launchers, but the most exotic piece of equipment is the Persuadertron. This device allows you to brainwash civilians and enemies into helping you, if they have (or get) a gun they'll even shoot at your enemies.

But if you think you can go around just persuading people you are wrong. This! Is! Syndicate! And it is impossible to finish the game without killing, mayhem, and ruthless disregard for property!

Still the game lets you have quite a lot of freedom in how you actually accomplish your missions, for example if your mission is to assassinate someone you can:
 * Storm his heavily guarded residence and kill him.
 * Ambush him on his way to a rally.
 * Use a sniper rifle while he is speaking at the rally.
 * Get in a car and kill him (and probably others) in a drive by shooting during the rally.
 * Storm the rally with flamethrowers and burn everyone to charred remains.

Expansion and Sequel:
The game was followed by an expansion pack, American Revolt. Now ruling the world, Eurocorp has lost control of the Western Hemisphere, and a series of rather difficult missions are needed to subdue it.

In the sequel, Syndicate Wars, the Syndicate has been managing the world for some undisclosed time, until an experimental mind-expanding program goes wrong. The scientists running it Go Mad From the Revelation, becoming "The Nine", heading the Church of the New Epoch. They spread a "Harbinger" Computer Virus that destroys the globe-running UTOPIA network and the chips in people's heads as the start of their Evil Plan, which you must either thwart or advance.

2012 Series Reboot


A reboot of the series was released in February 2012 but unlike its predecessors, the new Syndicate game is an action RPG/FPS hybrid written by Richard K Morgan. You play as Miles Kilo, a new Agent under Eurocorp implanted with a prototype DART chip which grant him cutting-edge hacking abilities. The game is linear with Kilo a silent protagonist and most of the story coming through cut-scenes or the environment.

A four-player co-op mode is also included, where you play as one of four Agents under upstart rival syndicate Wulf Western going against other syndicates, including Eurocorp. A demo for co-op was released 1 February 2012 for Xbox 360 and PS 3, showcasing the Western Europe level.

The most commonly referenced game element is "breaching" - real-time hacking of not only your environment, but your enemies. Persuading has been subsumed under this function, along with the ability to make enemies "Suicide" by holding a grenade or making their weapons explode. Everything Is Online, and the adrenaline surge of killing mooks translates into processing cycles, and thus more "breaches". -

The Original Syndicate provides examples of (2012 remake tropes go below):

 * Zero Percent Approval Rating: What you can end up with if you over-tax your territories. It is possible to abuse this mechanic horribly by deliberately making territories rebel, allowing you to garner extra cash or replacement agents by repeating the easier missions.
 * The All Seeing AI: In American Revolt, clone shields make you look like regular civilians. Enemy agents see right through them.
 * Artificial Limbs: Legs and arms made from metal, plastisteel, or cybermesh.
 * Artificial Stupidity: Invoked or averted at the player's discretion. Your agents' "chips" suppress their free will when you're giving them orders, but when left to their own devices (eg on guard while the rest of the team pushes forward, or while you micromanage another agent) their level of independence is determined by their IPA injectors.
 * To elaborate, Intelligence governs whether your agent will make a Tactical Withdrawal or fight with Suicidal Overconfidence; Perception determines whether they have Hyper Awareness or fail a spot check; and Adrenaline skews them towards either Caffeine Bullet Time or faster regeneration. The drugs take time to replenish, so you need to judge when best to activate them.
 * Badass Longcoat: With a ludicrous arsenal of weapons beneath it.
 * BFG: Let's start with the Minigun, and go from there. Syndicate also gives you a "Gauss Gun" rocket launcher and a laser, but it goes nuts in Syndicate Wars. Graviton Gun, anyone?
 * Bigger On the Inside: Have fun watching your agents and a whole crowd of Persuaded personnel disappear into a car. Or, even better, watch them all pile out at the other end and start shooting. Probably the ultimate Zerg Rush.
 * Black Comedy: The manual is full of it, especially in the Shout Out-laden "Rival Syndicates" chapter. Loads of things within the missions themselves can come off as Bloody Hilarious.
 * Blown Across the Room: Almost all hits cause the target to skid backwards.
 * Break Out the Museum Piece: One mission in Wars has you control a single agent who has been retired for several decades. He's sent in because his cybernetics are considered antiquated, but allow him to survive independantly since the crash of the UTOPIA system.
 * Bulletproof Human Shield: One more thing you can do with brainwashed civilians.
 * Church Militant: The Church of The New Epoch in Wars. They call their agents "acolytes" and you "disciple."
 * Clasp Your Hands If You Deceive: The player avatar, pretty much whenever we see him. Except when you fail a mission.
 * Cool Airship: The command centre of choice for the discerning executive.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: That's you, instructing your agents to gun down people EuroCorp finds inconvenient. Maybe your department is Murders And Executions.
 * Crapsack World: Your average dark, polluted, Cyberpunk future, with the chance of being gunned down in the street during corporate takeovers.
 * Deflector Shields: A researchable item.
 * Devil in Plain Sight: Justified in that civilians have perception-altering chips in their heads, and police have to show some respect for the law by not shooting until weapons are drawn.
 * Emergency Weapon: Every agent comes equipped with a single pistol, which is fine for flesh and blood targets - enemy agents, not so much.
 * Enemy Detecting Radar: Enemy agents, police and mission objectives show up against the crowd on the minimap.
 * Enemy Exchange Program: The best (read: only) way to replace lost agents is to Persuade enemy ones.
 * Enemy Mine: All the other syndicates team up against the player for the Atlantic Accelerator mission, resulting in a Nintendo Hard final battle. In the expansion, it's even more difficult since your agents are generally in fixed positions, and have to survive airstrikes.
 * Evil Brit: According to Wars, Eurocorp is based in London. The agent in the intro movie speaks in RP.
 * Evil Redhead: The Eurocorp operatives who abduct a new agent in the intro movie, the agent himself, and the two guys who stand beside the executive in another cutscene ALL have red hair.
 * Also, the agents you see in the game are either this, blonde or blue.
 * Evil Versus Evil: The first game is a battle between corrupt Mega Corps trying to take over the world. In the sequel the two main factions are the totalitarian government and a group of religious fanatics determined to brainwash enough people and then kill everyone else.
 * The Faceless: The player avatar, who is visible in some cutscenes but is always obscured by shadow.
 * Fun With Acronyms: The "CHIP"
 * Also the new agent in the intro movie - "Subject code: B.O.B" (which is also a Shout Out to an earlier draft of the game, which featured a Blue and Orange Bloke, or BOB for short)
 * And the UTOPIA network from Wars
 * Friendly Fireproof: Played straight with agents from the same company. Agents from two different companies can still injure each other (when the bullets fly around the energy shield)
 * Gaias Lament: The syndicates cause such an extreme level of environmental damage that ocean water is now pitch black. This is such a problem that even the syndicates have no choice but to recognize it, and so they build the Atlantic Accelerator in an attempt to reverse at least some of the damage.
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation: In the intro to Syndicate, someone is abducted from the street to be made into an agent, but in-game you can only recruit enemy agents turned by the Persuadatron.
 * Glowing Eyes of Doom: Agents, if the cover art is anything to go by. Probably implants.
 * Gory Discretion Shot: Any battle that takes place inside a building. Alternatively, depending on player sentiment, it may be an Offscreen Moment of Awesome instead.
 * Healing Factor: Your agents can slowly regenerate health thanks to their "artificially boosted healing indices".
 * Hollywood Cyborg
 * Holographic Terminal: The menus are designed to give this impression. Your character is shown to use this in cutscenes.
 * Honour Before Reason: Police will not challenge your rather conspicuous agents unless they've actually drawn a weapon.
 * Human Popsicle: When not out killing things, your agents reside in the "cryo chamber".
 * Humans Are White: No matter if your mission leads you to Africa, South America, or wherever, the civilians always appear to be Caucasian.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Your agents can pack eight miniguns without spoiling the line of their coat. For Syndicate Wars, you carry one of each gun and generate ammo internally, but still pack a truckload of BFGs and other gear. The Cerberus IFF auto-sentinel appears to be about the size of a man.
 * Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: In the intro for Syndicate Wars two agents start laying down More Dakka with their miniguns in order to take out the Unguided man who has just dropped off the UTOPIA network. Only one round manages to hit him in the shoulder, dropping him to the ground. Furthermore, one of the agents turns around and activates a computer targeting system on his minigun in order to take him out at point blank range.
 * Immune to Bullets: The Energy Shield prevents your soldiers from being hit by bullets. If you have five shields, you can remain indefinitely immune. It doesn't work so well when the enemy uses flamers, gauss guns, or other non-bullet attacks. Most enemies use bullets, rendering you invulnerable in most situations. Even if they could grab a shield-piercing weapon on the ground, they'll still try Shooting Superman with their ineffective minigun.
 * It Got Worse: Three global Mega Corps become so rich they can influence world governments, and develop the "CHIP" to increase their control over the population. Then The Syndicate starts bribing and murdering its way into the corporate board-rooms.
 * Kill It With Flamethrowers
 * Lightning Bruiser: Agents in both the original and remake.
 * Lightning Gun: The Electron Mace from Wars. The reboot brings it back.
 * Look Both Ways: Subverted for the most part, as most civilian cars will slow down and stop if your agents walk out in front of them. The sole exception is your own agents, who will cheerfully run over anything that gets in their way. Including allies.
 * Lotus Eater Machine: A form of this for the citizenry, who set the chips in their heads to see something more pleasant than reality. The intro movie for Syndicate Wars shows someone walking down a village street with the local bobbie waving to him, just as the Church's virus crashes the chip; the policeman becomes an armed riot cop, and the village turns into a dark Blade Runner-esque city.
 * Made of Iron: Shotgun? 'Tis but a scratch. Your agents are Badass cyborg Super Soldiers.
 * Man On Fire: Screaming and running, before expiring in a patch of dust. Charming.
 * Mega Corp: A series of them, with overt plans to conquer the world and the ability to manage it, fielding their own armed forces. Yours is canonically named EuroCorp.
 * Let's see, there's:
 * The Tao - Yakuza meets The Triads and The Tongs, characterised by ruthless efficiency.
 * Sphinx Inc. - scary dogmatic EGYPTIANS
 * Executive Jihad
 * The Independent Intelligence Agency - the CIA gone private. Being American, they like big guns and their agents are chosen for being Mighty Glaciers.
 * The Castrilos - ruthless bastards fond of blackmailing world governments
 * The TLC - Expanding from their initial goal of liberation for Tasmania, they kicked the Tao out of Australia despite being known for their poor aim, because the execs controlling their agents are always drunk.
 * Note that all these factions are only described in the manual (and not in the game), there are 8 different "enemy" MegaCorps fighting against you as opposed to the 6 only described in said manual (judging from the 8 different colors on the map indicating enemy-occupied territories on the metamap), and that no "Mega Corp" will ever attack your own territories suggest that this is just an example of Gameplay and Story Segregation.
 * Mind Control Device: The Persuadertron makes civilians follow you like sheep, and pick up weapons to join the fight. With enough civilians, you can turn the police or even enemy agents (used to refill the stock of agents you may have lost during previous missions.) This is one of the few weapons that doesn't alert the police, and with a large enough group, makes most missions easier.
 * Also, the modified chips that allow you to order your agents around within missions are basically this. Why yes, this does make you the player Obviously Evil.
 * In the Reboot, mind chips are as common as cellular phones - anyone with the right chips and programs can "breach" another person's chip and jam its connection to their weapons, make them attack their allies, or even shoot themselves in the head. One of the few people with this capability is the Player Character and co-op characters.
 * More Dakka: Missions can feature more than 20 mini-guns being fired simultaneously.
 * Musical Spoiler: Indicates an enemy cyborg in the vicinity.
 * Nanomachines: The justification for the instant effect of the med-kit.
 * Non Entity General: You're a man at a Holographic Terminal controlling your agents from an airship. That's all we know.
 * The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The Nine.
 * One-Man Army: Agents in both the originals and remake.
 * Out of the Inferno: Being quite literally Made of Iron, it's not really surprising that agents can pull this one off. Don't try to walk through a fire with a group of Persuaded civilians in tow, though.
 * Police Are Useless: Mostly because they're comprehensively outgunned by cyborg super soldiers wielding huge guns from fairly early on.
 * Product Placement: The sequel had animated advertisements for Ghost in The Shell and Judge Dredd on several advertising boards in-game, as well as at the drive-in movie theatre.
 * Rasputinian Death: It's possible to shoot people and have the impact push them into the path of oncoming traffic, or a train. This is really annoying if it happens to one of your agents.
 * Risk Style Map: The world is divided up into somewhat arbitrary regions, gobbled up by the major players as you progress.
 * Shout Out: Many of the agents are named after members of the design team (special agents Edgar, Jones, Donkin, and Mumford, among others)
 * SNK Boss: Most of this game runs the gamut from easy-ish to hard-ish. Then you get the infamous final mission, the Atlantic Accelerator; without a precision setup, you're lucky to last five seconds.
 * Somebody Else's Problem: If your agent is equipped with an ID card, police will react like this no matter what atrocities you are orchestrating.
 * The Syndicate: Obviously.
 * There Are No Good Executives
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: You can use an anti-tank laser to vaporize people, or if you don't want to shoot anything you can run people over with an APC.
 * The Wiki Rule: Overall wiki.
 * Three Quarters View, which doesn't reveal the inside of a building that a target is hiding in, even when he uses a minigun and attacks as soon as you open the door.
 * Throw Away Guns: You can't reload weapons in-mission. If you run out of ammo, you'll switch to a different weapon.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: Be honest, this is what the flame-thrower is there for. Slightly more subtly, let's round up a huge crowd of civilians and lead them on to the railway tracks! Syndicate Wars gives you more options: throw "psycho gas" into crowds and see them go nuts, or tool up with nuclear grenades and knock down buildings!
 * Villainous Breakdown: Upon hearing that a mission has failed, the player avatar emits a Big No, grabs a nearby lamp and throws it through his Holographic Terminal.
 * Villain Protagonist: Vast Mega Corp uses cyborg agents and More Dakka to Take Over the World. You're in the Corporation. You have a person knocked down in the street to be press-ganged as an agent, and that's just the intro movie.
 * Villain With Good Publicity: Facilitated by mind-controlling "chips".
 * We Can Rebuild Him: In the intro movie. You broke our new agent's leg by running him over when you kidnapped him off the street? No worries, we'll just slap on a cybernetic replacement and send him out there!
 * Window Pain: Stray bullets and explosion overpressure will shatter building windows, which has no in-game effect but looks cool.
 * A Winner Is You: Maybe they've improved, but Bullfrog weren't much cop at game endings. The end game animation is the exact same animated victory screen you see after beating every other level: a celebration in a city with your airship displaying the increasingly out-of-place message "Welcome To The Dawning Of A New Empire." It is then proceeded by a credit roll.
 * You Have Failed Me: If you lose all your agents, someone higher up in the company sets off a bomb on your airship.
 * You Have Researched Breathing: Despite being set in a Cyberpunk future, and your syndicate fielding cyborg Super Soldiers managed by mind control chips from a Holographic Terminal, your armoury only consists of pistols until the R&D department re-invents Uzis, shotguns, flamethrowers and the like.
 * Of course, it may be that the weapons do already exist, and "R&D" is a euphemism for the guys who go out and find you the appropriate arms dealers.
 * You Nuke'Em: The "Cataclysm" nuclear grenade in Syndicate Wars, which will knock down buildings.
 * Zeppelins From Another World: You operate from an airship with huge advertising screens on the sides.

The Reboot/Remake provides examples of:

 * All Asians Are Alike: Aspari is a merger of the Triads and Yakuza, employing both Chinese and Japanese.
 * Always Someone Better: Eurocorp is this to Wulf Western. Many of the Wulf Western equipment tooltips describe them as imperfect replications of Eurocorp stuff.
 * Authority Equals Asskicking: Sergeants are Elite Mooks, the Lieutenants may be minibosses and the Colonel in co-op demo is a boss. The "end boss" for co-op, found in New England, is a General; he's basically an Agent armed with a minigun and backed up by 3 other Agents.
 * Awesome but Impractical: The COIL laser. It's a laser so it's awesome by default, but the primary fire only hurts a little more than an assault rifle; the secondary fire is absolutely devastating, but eats ammo so fast every clip only has four uses, and you usually only get two clips total.
 * Badass Longcoat: All Syndicate Agents wear one. A collectible text message reveals they're actually advanced body armor imbedded with a number of electronic combat systems, and are incredibly expensive (as mentioned by an armory supervisor chewing out a subordinate suspected of stealing one to take pictures of himself wearing it).
 * Better to Die Than Be Killed: The way in which . Also counts for.
 * Bling Bling Bang: A preorder bonus for the co-op.
 * Breaking the Bonds: You do this at the start.
 * Bullet Time: One of the primary effects of the DART Overlay ability is this. It's pretty much mandatory to survive the game, especially in the insane boss fights.
 * But Not Too Evil: Inverted. Reviewers called out Starbreeze for.
 * But Thou Must: About 3/4ths of the way through the game, Miles Kilo  Later, at the end of the game
 * Call Back: The Leonardo Device, now called Vitruvian Machine, returns in this game. No, it doesn't cut your legs off.
 * Call Forward: The reboot's co-op levels to the original.
 * Combat Medic: One of the co-op only Breaches is the ability to heal your teammates.
 * Crapsack World: Just like the original
 * Cyberpunk is Dubstep: The 2012 remake's soundtrack features songs by Skrillex.
 * Damn You Muscle Memory: The control scheme has enough similarities to fellow published-by-EA Crysis 2, including the sprint-into-slide and automatic ledgegrabbing, that you might be confused when it isn't. L1/LB is Breach, not Maximum Armour; R1/RB is DART Overlay rather than Cloak. The real kicker, though, is when you double-tap Y/Triangle to get your 'nades out and wonder why they don't show up. It's hold Y/Triangle here.
 * Deflector Shields: Enemy UAVs, all 3 variants of Syndicate Elite Mooks, and the final boss(es) all have these. You need to breach them before you can even harm the shielded enemy. A regenerating player version is available as a purchaseable upgrade; it functions similar to the shield from Halo and various other similar shooters.
 * Doom Troops: Almost all the mooks, but especially the Elite Mooks.
 * Doppelganger Spin: Done by the Agent Tatsuo.
 * Dual Boss: The first phase of the final boss fight has you fighting
 * Dynamic Entry: Agent Tatsuo makes his appearance teleporting in and giving Miles a Boot to the Head. There are also several opportunities for Miles himself to do this.
 * Easy Levels Hard Bosses: One of the Most... Guilty... Ever!!!! The levels are noticeably more challenging than most other FPS games, but are manageable once you get the hang of the gameplay mechanics. However, most of the bosses are completely insane, even on the "Normal" difficulty setting. The final boss in particular is on par with the likes of General RAAM in terms of player frustration. That is not a compliment, Starbreeze.
 * Elite Mooks: Cayman Global's liquid soldiers and the active camouflage-wearing Subverters would both count. Cayman Global's reactive soldiers and EuroCorp's electro-armor soldiers are outright Boss in Mook Clothing or mini-bosses.
 * Eye Scream: One of the chip extractions is done via a stab in the eye.
 * Evil Versus Evil: Eurocorp and Aspari. They fight against one another, but both of them show callous disregard for the lives of their customers and personnel. This is also implied to be the case with the other corporations.
 * Face Heel Turn:
 * The Faceless: You.
 * Foreshadowing: There are several conversations and text collectibles setting up the Church of the New Epoch (the antagonists of Syndicate Wars) as potential villains in a sequel.
 * Guttural Growler: Agent Merit.
 * Hand Cannon: All the handguns, but especially the Bullhammer Mk II, a revolver firing .600. One upgrade option for that is the Magnetic Acceleration Rail, which gives it an impact profile, to directly quote the fluff, "such that it's often mistaken for cannon or explosive blasts in police investigations."
 * Heroic BSOD: Miles Kilo has one just after the final boss fight, immediately after  It's noticeable because Miles is otherwise an ice-cold S.O.B., as revealed by his thought comments on the level select screen.
 * Heroic Mime: Miles Kilo, to underline his lack of agency. The co-op characters, by contrast, are very chatty, and will even celebrate their kills.
 * Hey It's That Voice: This game has Scolar Visari, The Prophet of Truth, and Rosario Dawson as the 3 main characters. Also, Kath Soucie voices your CHIP. Not her first time playing a computer either.
 * Hoist By His Own Petard: To defeat Agent Ramon, you must Breach his missiles and turn them against him.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted where the game makes you conform to the now-standard two gun setup.
 * Heel Face Turn:
 * Ironic Echo:
 * It's Up to You: You only get help from a friendly ally on two seperate occasions in the entire game, and both times they're very little use. Merit is largely absent during your assault on Aspari, and when you finally do meet up with him near the end of the mission, he gets K.O.ed by an enemy Agent after only taking out a couple of Mooks. Lily helps you fight through EuroCorp H.Q. towards the end of the game, and surprisingly can often take out Mooks with one shot (amusingly making her more useful than Merit was), but is fairly unaggressive in combat and gets seperated from you pretty quickly anyway.
 * Internet Backlash: Hoo boy. As soon as the announcement video for the reboot came out, many people complained that the game was: A) going to be a bad remake of a good game, B) just going to be another generic FPS because the devs wouldn't use the isometric style from the previous games, and C) a copy of Deus Ex Human Revolution.
 * Invisibility Cloak: Present for some mooks, but neither Miles nor the co-op characters have one.
 * Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Boss enemies are initially immune to Breaches and must be softened up first.
 * Subverters are immune to breaching, because they don't have any chips for you to hack. Their weapons can still be hacked, though.
 * Last Ditch Move: Electro and reactive armours have these. You get achievements for using them to kill other mooks.
 * Lightning Bruiser: All enemy Syndicate Agents are insanely fast, and can survive more damage than most FPS Powered Armor suits while tearing you a new one equally fast.
 * Lightning Gun: The Electron Mace.
 * Limit Break: DART Overlay. It make surroundings looks slowed down to you and show enemies that hide behind cover. Mandatory in some boss fight.
 * Man in White: The Cayman Global officers have white armour, unlike the black and dark grey of Sergeants or normal grunts. Several boss Agents wear white.
 * Mega Corp: Just like in the original, Syndicates act as the sole authority in a region controlling everything from sanitation to law enforcement.
 * Mind Control Device: The neural chips are as common as cellular phones - anyone with the right chips and programs can "breach" another person's chip and jam its connection to their weapons, make them attack their allies, or even shoot themselves in the head. One of the few people with this capability is the Player Character and co-op characters.
 * Musical Spoiler: Skrillex remixed the original's for the remake's theme.
 * Mythology Gag: In the opening sequence of the reboot there is a part where the years tick up to the time the game takes place in. It starts in 1993 when the original came out.
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast: One of the agents in the Co-Op mode is called Akuma, which roughly translates as "Demon" in Japanese.
 * Neck Snap: One of the melee attacks in the reboot.
 * Non-Lethal KO: When you run out of health in the co-op, you have to be rebooted by a teammate.
 * No Holds Barred Beatdown: The player uses this to kill . The fact that that Kilo, after the beating, stops and looks at his now bloodied hands suggests this was also a My God, What Have I Done? moment for him.
 * Overt Operative: The intro mentions that the corporations employ covert agents like yourself. With the liberal amounts of firepower you can access and must use, covert you most certainly are not.
 * Peace and Love Incorporated: The Syndicates are like a textbook on how to do this. They criticize their competitors for their unethical actions while doing the exact same things, all while caring first and foremost for their "consumers."
 * Percussive Maintenance: Agent Miles, or atleast the DART 6 system is activated by a Mook punching him repeatedly, it makes some sense as the DART is fueled by adrenaline.
 * Playing Tennis With the Boss: The fight with Agent Ramon goes like this, as the two of you hack rockets back and forth at each other.
 * Quick Melee: You can perform a lethal melee takedown. It can also be combined with the Executioner chip upgrade that restores 50% on each kill, and can be used in a combo where it heals you more quickly then enemies that can harm you. Enemy marksmen on high-up ledges, UAVs, and armored Elite Mooks, are resistant to this.
 * The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The Syndicates are unquestionably evil, at least by 20th century standards of morality. However, the Resistance are terrorists who are unable to offer any alternatives other than "kill as many bourgeois as possible" (although it's hinted that a less militant wing of the Resistance, which is not seen in the game, is working on a more scientific solution).
 * Rock Beats Laser: The LAW-92 is a relatively low-tech unguided missile popular with terrorists because Agents cannot disable them via Breaching.
 * The Subverters use crude molotov cocktails instead of electronic frag grenades. They can't be breeched, detonate on impact, and are a one-hit-kill against you even if it's not a direct hit. This can make them Demonic Spiders.
 * Shout Out: The Kusanagi brand assault and sniper rifles. While the name is Older Than They Think, in this context it's hard to avoid thinking of a certain Major.
 * The Sociopath: Agent Merit's dossier remarks that all Agents are expected to be psychopaths, but Merit is psychopathic even by Agent standards. Also, the corporate, ethically bankrupt Syndicate society effectively fosters a general attitude that the lives of others are meaningless except to the extent they can be used to benefit yourself.
 * Take That: Reactive Armour provides protection against "tunneling rounds", which are an upgrade choice in Deus Ex Human Revolution.
 * Teleport Spam: Aspari Agent Tatsuo.
 * Training From Hell: Agent training includes taking No Holds Barred Beatdown and live-fire courses with gunships.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: It's possible to slaughter civilians left and right, including inside non-combat storyline areas (which can lead to hilarity in some of the storyline areas). However, it's somewhat discouraged by not giving any Breach energy back when you kill them.
 * Weak but Skilled: Miles Kilo is this (by Agent standards, anyway. To regular humans he's still a Super Soldier). He lacks any of the really incredible superpowers other enemy Agents have (super-speed, holograms, super-jumping ability, impenetrable shields, cloaking devices, enhanced regeneration, etc.) However, his in-game dossier remarks that he is unusually creative and independent for an Agent, which allows him to come out ahead when faced with better-empowered enemies.
 * The Wiki Rule: Here ya go.