Syndicate stands out from Bullfrog's back catalogue of excellent, friendly God-games and dreadful carpet-riding rubbish. It's dark, brooding and remarkably brutal. It's a vision of a future world entirely controlled by a few uber-corporations, where you are a 'marketing director' for one such company, responsible for improving your business' standing. By violently murdering the competition!!
Not only was it a superb satire of capatalist greed, but also an excellent isometric cyberpunk action game. Mission-structured, it's dark humour and refined level design make it stand out as an all-time classic for good reason. Read on!!!
SYNDICATEA ninja dressed in gaudy blue has just grabbed the eye-sockets of his opponent and torn his head clear of his body, dangling a couple of feet of glistening wet spinal cord after it. Cue screams from the horrified tabloid press. Gamers, on the other hand, laughed at it or with it, depending on their temperament.
It's 1993, and
Mortal Kombat, in terms of press controversy, is the
GTA of it's day.
But
only in those terms. Anyone who has actually played the game knows it belongs purely to the tradition of video nasties, a comedy fountain of gore.
Mortal Kombat was just slapstick with a very sharp stick.
It wasn't bad to the bone.
Syndicate, conversely, was the meanest bastard the world had ever seen. If you want to find out about the road that leads to
Grand Theft Auto, you start with the four gentlemen with trenchcoats, mirrorshades and miniguns, sitting in the corner.
Syndicate didn't get the bad press of
Mortal Kombat for a handful of reasons. Firstly, it was a game for the PC and Amiga, with a correspondingly lower public profile. But more importantly, to really understand how immoral it was, you had to play it. And playing a game? Well that's one thing the reactionary end of the press will never consider.
Syndicate put you in the role of a commander of four cybernetically enhanced goons, in the employ of a global corporation. Your task was that of building a new world order, one hostile takeover of a country at a time. Once you'd been given your mission and let loose in the city, it was up to you to achieve it by any means necessary. normally, this would revolve around wiping out opposing corporate agents, but other things to see and do in the near future included rescue, escort, brainwashing and assassination.
Syndicate distinguished itself by being one of the earliest examples of a 'living city' game. People wandered around, going about their everyday business before having their routine (and often their bodies!) exploded by corporate conflict in the high street. Cars patrolled the roads and could be commandeered with a burst of Uzi fire. Caught in the middle, the cops desperately tried to keep the peace...
Back then, this was all shockingly new. Emphasis on the word 'shocking'.
My first experience of
Syndicate was the demo on the coverdisc of Amiga Format. My friend and I were already excited: for the time, the game had been beautifully marketed. Photo-led adverts of hands hanging off a chainlink fence, a pollution-painted city in the background. They were - in fact, still are - a few steps classier than the competition. We both loved cyberpunk fiction, and in a world dominated by bright platformers we were ready for some of the dark stuff.
Witihn seconds, we're running rampage through isometric streets. I'm in control with my mate shouting suggestions of what to do next. Automatic weapons are pulled from jackets and any of the civilians who see them scatter, running for their lives. Coppers start firing and are dropped with a burst of fire. A car pulls around the corner and we open fire again. The car slides to a halt, it's passengers getting out and fleeing. Another couple of bursts and the car itself explodes, sending debris and civilian bodies flying in all directions.
We're both wearing our biggest Bad Boy grins when something makes our faces fall. It's a noise. High-pitched and sharp, it cuts through the general aural melee of a city firefight. We realise it's coming from the tiny people. They're on fire. The explosion must have sprayed them with petrol or something, and now they're reduced to living torches.
We sit, dumfounded. My mate is the first to speak. "Kill them."
I open fire, trying to put them out of their misery...
This was the first time a game had provoked such a sensation of, well, moral repugnance at myself! In the end, the burning people from car explosions were cut from the final game, saved for the later appearance of the flamethrower. It was still a uniquely brutal effect - especially at the time. The choice of SFX was masterful, and I can still recall the pitch and attack of that noise (which I've zipped at the end of this post in the attachments) as I have the very same SFX as my message-alert on my mobile phone!!
The tiny animation was gruesomely suggestive enough to let your mind fill in the gaps of flesh melting away from bone.
It's one of the reasons why
Syndicate still sticks with me. It was phenomenally ahead of it's time. While I'd argue that
Syndicate's cities were more advanced than anything previously, even if they weren't that far ahead, the way the game used them was. Forget the slaughter and the realistic response of the environment to what was happening. Think of ideas such as the way you manipulated your agents by pumping their bodies with different drugs depending on what you wanted them to do. Or the Persuadertron, which enabled you to assemble a mass of consumerist zombies as a ready-made army.
I suppose that's one of the things that keeps
Syndicate precious - even in these days when
everything is borrowing from
GTA's rampage-in-a-freeform-city mandate. For all the nihilism, there was a brain to it, a satirical edge. Multinational agents leading hordes of consumerist zombies to achieve corporate aims? As a pulp object,
Syndicate makes it's point forcibly. What makes it succeed as a game is that while all the critique is still there, it simultaneously explains all too well why anyone would want to wield this amount of power - through the sheer illicit transgressive thrill of playing it. Pulling the trigger on the sniper laser that reduces to a smudge of ash the politician who wouldn't play ball. Stealing a police car and getting through prison security to rescue someone, and then mowing down every single prisoner for no reason other than to see their bodies fall in piles at the end of the prison yard. And the final Gauss-gun painted confrontation of the Arctic Accelerator mission, still one of the most famously challenging end-of-game missions of all time.
Bad to the bone. But the most evil thing about
Syndicate - the thing all it's players will answer for if they're ever stopped at the gates of heaven - is how good being so bad was!
Syndicate: a holiday in somebody else's misery - and, best of all, a misery you caused!
But it didn't stop there, oh no! A while after the release of
Syndicate, an expansion disc called
American Revolt came along with all new missions to undertake! Heaven-in-a-box!!
Syndicate Wars came along in 1996 and expanded the original isometric engine to one of full rotatable 3D!!
In
Syndicate you played as one of many Syndicates who wished to control the world. Since then, one Syndicate has risen to that position - Eurocorp. Through their UTOPIA chips they control the population, or at least most of it. A rival group, The Church of the New Epoch, has risen up to destroy UTOPIA and overthrow Eurocorp. You will take on one of two roles, an exectutive for Eurocorp or a disciple for The Church of the New Epoch.
The game is played in a similar manner to the original game. You control a team of four cyborgs, and with them, you will take on various missions for your organisation in a number of locations around the world. But as in
Syndicate, it is not just the missions that you need to think about. You need a strong team, so it is important to buy improved parts for your cyborg characters. Also, the better weapons they have, the stronger they will be. At the start you have limited knowledge of technology so you must assign funds to research and also pick up any new technologies you find out in the field and send them to your research team. You start with a limited amount of money and the early missions won't generate any real income for you, so be careful with the cash at the start.
Now, trying to get hold of the gem that is
Syndicate nowadays is bloody hard! If you're lucky enough to be able to find a copy on eBay, i'd buy it! I personally have gone down the abandonware route and have downloaded the games!
They took
forever to download due to the fact that 99% of the torrents are dead but I have both
Syndicate, Syndicate American Revolt and
Syndicate Wars installed on my PC! As theyre ancient games by todays standards, they only run in DOS, so i use DOSBOX to run them. As i have a powerful PC i can run them with no slowdown whatsoever and theyre all mint games to have a blast on every now and then when i feel nostalgic!
If you'd like me to burn copies of the games for you onto DVD then just reply to this message with your email address and i'll mail you to confirm your postal address.
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Topic: [Syndicate] Games that changed the world! (Read 1118 times)