![warhammer total war desync warhammer total war desync](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ViO0ixqVs_g/maxresdefault.jpg)
Some are simple enough to pop up as a matter of course-dashing up to an enemy and unloading the shotgun in their face, for instance-but if you want the real rewards, you’ll be juggling mobs with rockets, launching them into spikes, parrying their attacks, blasting them out of the air, and generally treating them with all the respect and care of pig carcasses on the set of a particularly ruthless Mythbusters episode. On the face of it, the combo system is not all that unlike Bulletstorm’s: a mile-long list of stylish kills, and combat actions-they call them ‘attack sequences’-that you can discover through experimentation or, on occasion, through random chance. Desync is one of a kind the Devil May Cry of first-person shooters. It’s about getting into a flow and staying there, riding high on a wave of dismembered cybergremlins. The more stylish your moves, the harder you hit, the faster you run, the more frequently your abilities recharge. Alright, alright, the gunplay has plenty of that familiar circle-strafing, back-pedalling, monster-gibbing flavour to it, but if you walk into the first level like it’s E1M1 then you’ll be booted out of the matrix before you can say “rip and tear”, marine. Whenever a shooter with lots of whiplash speed and fluid movement hits the limelight, the same comparisons get rolled out it’s ‘like Quake but’, or ‘like Doom but’, and usually that does the trick because those are well-known formulas that withstood the test of time, so most games in that vein are indeed ‘like Doom but’. Fortunately, your guns are also very, very tangible. They might represent viruses or malware or ad popups in some abstract way, but for all intents and purposes they’re tangible things that want you dead. What matters is that there are monsters, and they need to die. You have been thrust into an abstract cyberspace cyberscape with enough purple and scanlines to keep the retrowave music video industry going for another decade or so, and your job is to, uh… hack the Gibson? Bring down the system? Look, it’s not important.