Syndicate "was a lost battle from the get go"

The CEO of developer Starbreeze has admitted that recent FPS release Syndicate was a lost battle from the get-go”.

The game, published by EA, was released earlier this year and was based on the 1993 IP that enjoyed huge success on PC, Amiga and various consoles.

However, the game faced hostility from the word go after it was revealed that Starbreeze was abandoning the game’s strategy roots and instead making it into a first person shooter.

"I’m still proud of it," Mikael Nermark told Edge. "To have the courage to reboot the franchise. We knew from the get-go that there was going to be a small but very vocal [group] of gamers and journalists that was going to hate us whatever route we took.

"If we didn’t do an exact copy of the game, they’d hate us. If we did do an exact copy, they’d say we didn’t innovate. They were never ours to win; it was a lost battle from the get-go.

"But I’m proud of what the team did and what we made, and I’m especially proud of the co-op; I think that really shows what we wanted to do with the game, and Starbreeze’s DNA."