Preteen girl looking at a cell phone with her parents

Personalized picks at your fingertips

Get the mobile app on iOS and Android

Parents' Guide to

DESYNC

By Michael Lafferty, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 14+

Fun yet challenging shooter tests skills, patience.

Game Windows 2017
DESYNC Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this game.

Community Reviews

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

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.

Game Details

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

See how we rate