In Synergy, players create a civilization that has abolished racism but has no idea what eco-friendly means. As the title suggests, Synergy finds the survivors of a planetary dystopia needing to work together to stave off starvation and extinction. It’s a balancing act stricter than my failing keto diet. Districts and buildings must achieve perfect harmony to maximize their effects upon art, science, industry, comfort, agriculture, and civil concerns, which means carefully weighing metrics such as distance and proximity, as well as available population, their education, their access to food and amenities, and their well-being.
Synergy boasts a fairly complex construction tree with unlockable structures and upgrades. Additionally, evolving biomes and shifting weather patterns forge new opportunities but new concerns. Run out of food? Dead. No water? Dead. Inadequately equip an expedition? There’s a pattern here though it’s not always clear what went wrong. In fact, my first few hours were spent failing the campaign missions before I forced myself to reason through the finer points of cultivation or soil sampling, not to mention heat indexes. My left brain got a workout! I was left believing that Synergy is an intelligent game.
If you expect to play casually or fail to pay attention to a city’s stats, it’s easy to start well, sure, but you’ll quickly wind up with a metropolitan nightmare more poorly planned and traffic-jammed than Los Angeles. The gameplay is demanding but so was the game on my hardware, a situation which, according to the official Discord, Synergy’s development team is aware of and working to resolve. Slowdown, freezes, and glitches sadly forced my white flag prematurely. I had to give up after building a massive cityscape that ground the game to a halt. However, the stellar Moebius-inspired art style kept me intrigued and addicted for many solar cycles. Rome wasn’t built in a day so I’m looking forward to how Leikir Studio optimizes their vision past v1.0. For fans of city-building games and micromanagement gameplay, Synergy is a whole new world destined to achieve a brighter future.
Thank you to Leikir Studio, Goblinz Publishing, and H2 Interactive for trusting us with a copy of Synergy for this review.
Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves amid a gaming culture that’d rather talk about anything but. Pick out his feathered cap @thewellredmage or @thewellredmage.bsky.social.
