DESYNC

This arcade-like shooter is fun, but its high degree of challenge and difficulty will test your skills like never before. Throwing your keyboard through the monitor with this game may seem like a good idea, but it solves nothing. DESYNC can foster that sort of rage and is easily one of the most challenging shooters to come out recently. The idea of the game is simple, and the intuitive control scheme keeps the focus on player skills, not on fumbling to learn to control this challenging beast. The game is graphically impressive, flaring with neon colors, with an underbeat audio track and the occasional flicker of lines as though you're viewing the world through an old CRT screen. The variety of weapons isn't overdrawn, but the weapons can be effective. And each weapon has a variety of ways to use it. You pick up style points for kills (desyncs) that translate into leaderboard scores. This isn't a game where players can camp and shoot the enemies that come at them; on the contrary, if you don't move constantly, you will disconnect (die) and have to start all over.

Where DESYNC suffers the most is in the same arena where it excels: the challenge. This is a game that can seem insufferably hard at times, which makes it inappropriate for younger players. And when you think you see a rhythm to the game, the mutators enter to change everything up and throw players for a loop. If you think you have the FPS chops, then DESYNC might be just what you're looking for; other, beware -- this is a beast of a game that will beat you down and ignore pleas for an easy difficulty setting.