It’s a fact fairly well documented on this blog that I like Syndicate. Bullfrog’s little slice of unrestrained corporate mayhem is timeless in my eyes, and so when the Satellite Reign Kickstarter popped up a couple of years back it immediately caught my interest for being made by some ex-Bullfrog staff and for being marketed as a spiritual successor to Syndicate. We could certainly do with one, because while the Starbreeze Syndicate FPS had a few unexpected redeeming features it was at best extremely average and not at all what Syndicate was about. Satellite Reign at least preserves the series’ top-down isometric perspective and four-man (or woman) team of agents, so it’s already a better stab at recapturing the old magic than Starbreeze managed. That’s a very low bar to clear, however; they might be going about it the right way, but is this modern attempt to resurrect Syndicate any good?

I have a feeling that this review is going to descend into complaining and nitpicking pretty quickly. (Most of my reviews do, to be fair.) So I would like to get one thing out of the way before we start: Satellite Reign is a game with a *lot* of problems. Some of them are design problems. Some of them are thematic problems. Some of them are technical problems. Some of them are just plain bugs – this is another game that has come out of Early Access several months too early, presumably because the developers were running out of money. Despite all of these many annoyances, though, I’ve still put nearly fifteen hours into the thing over this bank holiday weekend. It’s increasingly rare that a game gets that kind of commitment out of me, and while you can chalk part of it up to the fact that I am a massive Syndicate fanboy it’s also impossible to deny that Satellite Reign gets at least as much right as it does wrong. And for game with as long a laundry list of problems as Satellite Reign, that is impressive.

So. It is the cyberpunk near-future, and the Dracogenics corporation has a vice-like grip on the unnamed City in which Satellite Reign is set thanks to its monopoly on resurrection technology (where dead people are simply downloaded into new bodies upon their demise – if you’ve ever read Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon series you’ll have a pretty good picture of how this works). You play the part of a shadowy competitor company who has inserted a group of four agents into the City with the objective of wresting control of the resurrection tech away from Dracogenics by any means necessary. To do this you need to acquire money, research new technology and weapons, and upgrade/skill up your agents to the point where they’re capable of making an assault on the Dracogenics HQ. To do all of those things you need to send your agents on various errands around the city to steal everything you need to progress, and because this is a game with Syndicate DNA these heists often involve violent shootouts with the teams of guards patrolling the compounds that you’re trying to infiltrate.

Only often, though. Much to its credit Satellite Reign isn’t interested in simply rebuilding Syndicate from the ground up, and does put a lot of effort in trying to evolve the idea while introducing new elements. In Syndicate combat was the only way forward; you could walk around with your weapons concealed for a little bit but sooner or later you’d be attacked by enemy agents and everything would start exploding. By contrast Satellite Reign does its best to offer you alternative methods to gain access to the secrets you’re supposed to steal – security systems you can hack to turn off or even convert to your side, power generators you can sabotage to cut power to automated defenses, and vents you can crawl through to shortcut a set of particularly nasty defenses. These alternative methods are often only available to a single member of your team, as each agent belongs to a particular class with a specific set of abilities that’ll take advantage of a specific subset of stuff, but if you use them effectively it’s sometimes possible to get your Infiltrator up to the vault without tripping any alarms or encountering any guards.

These non-combat routes are a welcome addition to the game, especially at the start when you don’t have any items or augmentations and fighting the guards is a dicey prospect because your agents are so fragile. Bypassing even one security checkpoint can make a given objective so much easier, and the alternate routes do play well with your agent classes. There’s the Soldier, who can carry heavy weapons towards the end of the game but whose main utility ability is Hardwiring doors and power generators to turn them on/off; the Hacker, who can hack security systems, deploy drones and Hijack a limited number of enemy personnel so that they’ll fight on your side (because no Syndicate game would be complete without a Persuadertron ability); the Infiltrator, who can cloak, access vents and use ziplines, and has a devastatingly powerful melee attack that is silent and can usually take out a guard in one hit; and finally the Support, who has access to a number of team buffing and healing abilities as well as the Scan view, which shows which systems are connected up to which power generators and gives you important clues as to what you can do with your environment.

I thought this class system worked really, really well. All of the agents have abilities that get used both in infiltration and in a fight, and all of these abilities are genuinely quite useful; everybody feels powerful and there’s nobody who gets stuck on the sidelines because their skillset is overbalanced towards one element or the other. On the other hand the system for unlocking skills is a bit janky, since your XP gain is never surfaced and so you can never figure out what precisely you are doing to level up, and skills are presented to you as a simple list where you can’t see the whole tree and only have visibility of what the next level will give you (which is why it’s taken me this long to unlock extra weapon slots for my agents – that’s a passive buried on level 3 of the Weapons skill branch and I wasn’t 100% on whether it was a skill or an upgrade that unlocked them). This makes it really, really difficult to plan the development of your agents because your brain is stuck in a short-term analysis of what you can immediately unlock instead of coming up with a long term build plan.

So the skill system is a little bit mixed, but mostly leans towards the “Great” end of the spectrum. Time to talk about something at the other end of the scale: the City environment, and the compounds you sneak/fight your way into. Satellite Reign isn’t broken up into a selection of discrete missions, but instead takes place in a (relatively) seamless open-world city inside which are placed all of the fortified encampments you must infiltrate. The City looks great. Seriously. I’m actually a little astounded an indie developer came up with a 3D environment that looks as good – and as varied – as Satellite Reign’s does. There’s animated billboards a la Blade Runner, loads of unique assets for shops, hotels and corporation logos, lashings and lashings of neon, and it’s all washed down with an omnipresent acid rain.

Unfortunately when it comes to the things the city contains – the people, the cars, the guards and the compounds — I have to be a lot more qualified with my praise. (Or rather, unqualified with my criticism.) The cars are an easy target; they’re non-interactive objects that exist so that there’s something to populate the roads – you can’t commandeer cars like you could in Syndicate and you (and your enemies) can’t be damaged by being hit by one either, and so they’re there entirely for the ambience. Which is why it’s puzzling that they’re animated so bloody terribly, going from 0 to 60 in about half a second, slowing down just as fast and cornering at full speed like they’re on rails. I don’t care if these are the magic self-driving cars of the future, they feel like placeholders the programmer threw in at the last moment with only the most rudimentary car-like behaviour – they don’t look or feel like cars should. The people I’m a little more forgiving on since Syndicate civilians have only ever existed to be gunned down in crossfire and so it’s sufficient for them to simply meander around randomly, but there’s these weird little interludes where they blunder into a secured area, the guards approach and apprehend them as they would with one of your agents — and then after five seconds the guard forgets they exist and they get up and walk off. It could have been a really nice atmospheric touch, but again it comes across as something half-baked that wasn’t integrated into the game properly.

Then you’ve got the guards and the compounds, which are the second-biggest thing wrong with Satellite Reign. In terms of abstract design, the guards are fine; there’s a pleasing variety of light guards, heavy guards, shielded guards, minigun guards etc. etc., packed in with sentry guns and security drones. Even when they’re not alerted, though, it’s clear there’s something not quite right with their behaviour as they do U-turns without actually turning (making it difficult if you’re trying to be stealthy and stay out of their vision cones) and often get stuck on pieces of scenery that happen to be blocking their patrol – a lot of the time this happens to be another guard, which is frustrating if they’ve gotten stuck right on your planned route into an enemy base. They can’t cope with doors, either, repeatedly running into and out of them ad infinitum until you take pity on them and shoot them to put them out of their misery.

It’s when the shooting starts that the guards really start to become erratic, though. There’s a rudimentary cover system in Satellite Reign that they’ll try to take advantage of, even if the nearest piece of cover happens to be the same one that your agents are sheltering behind. If there’s no nearby cover they’ll simply stop and unload their weapons in your general direction as soon as they’re in range and have line of sight, making it very easy to hit them with a grenade when they’re all clustered up. The only reason they’re any threat whatsoever is because even an individual unshielded unarmoured guard has buckets of hitpoints, and Satellite Reign isn’t shy about spawning dozens and dozens of them to ruin your day as soon as you make some noise. Most of the time there’s a fairly obvious cause-and-effect system going on here, as there are three types of events that will summon guards from the reinforcement closets scattered around the map: getting spotted by a camera (or shooting a camera), a guard or a drone that’s seen you calling in an alert, and setting off explosive items such as grenades and satchel charges.

I don’t have a problem with any of this. My problem is that there’s a random respawn system that works in tandem with this obvious noise = baddies system, and often it’ll spawn enemies behind you in an area you thought you’d already cleared, even though you made no noise whatsoever. Then when the firefight does actually start you end up getting attacked from two sides at once, which isn’t a good situation to be in even when you’re fully equipped; at the start of the game when you’re still finding your feet this often results in four dead agents. Satellite Reign’s adamant refusal to pretend that it isn’t just spawning guards out of nowhere to fight you is a serious issue that undoes much of the amazing work that’s been done on the visuals; the developers go to all this trouble of making a fantastic looking City and then populate it with this incredibly gamey respawn system that completely breaks any credibility it might have had as an actual, believable place.

Finally there’s the compounds. Every single one of Satellite Reign’s missions involves breaking into one of these compounds, which is a huge problem because every single one of these compounds is effectively the same. Oh, the game tries to change things up from time to time – each compound is littered with the alternative routes I mentioned earlier, and occasionally you’ll get a mission where you have to escort an NPC into/out of the compound, but ultimately it plays out identically: each compound is a restricted, walled-off, shoot-on-sight area with one or more ring of fortifications that are constantly patrolled by guards and drones. At the centre of the fortifications is a magic door. Your job is to get one of your agents (or the NPC) to the magic door. After they enter the magic door, they’ll steal some money and emerge with one or more technology prototypes in hand. Then you have to fight your way back out of the compound and back to a save point.

Satellite Reign tries to build flavour around the magic doors inside its compounds. This one is the main R&D facility for the Eternals, it says, and you’ll get some sweet shielding tech if you go inside! (The Eternals are purple guards who use lasers.) The Industrial district is the heart of Uzy Corp. (red guards, plasma guns) and if you hit their weapons manufacturing plant you’ll get prototype miniguns! The problem is this is all just words in the mission description. No matter what Satellite Reign says you’re doing, at the end of the day it will boil down to your agents shooting their way into a compound and entering a Magic Door to get some new tech for you to research. There is almost no variety; occasionally you get told to assassinate or bribe a random civilian but this is something you can accomplish in literally seconds, and so 90% of your time in Satellite Reign is spent skulking around compounds. Even robbing a bank is – you guessed it – blasting your way into a compound so that your Soldier can go through the Magic Door. It says they’re packing explosives to blast open the vault, but you don’t see any evidence of this when they go inside; they just go in and come back out again like they’re depositing a cheque. In Syndicate Wars you didn’t just blast open the vault, you demolished the entire bank with high explosives and picked the cash money out of the rubble.

This brings me on to possibly the thing I like least about Satellite Reign: its failure to attach an appropriate sense of scale and importance to your actions. Say what you like about Syndicate Wars, but that was a game that made you absolutely buy in to the idea that you had complete control over the resources of a futuristic global corporate entity. When you researched a new gun, you threw millions of dollars at it. When you fired that new gun, you could guarantee something suitably pyrotechnic would happen. When you installed augmentations on your agents, you got to see a nice CGI bionic limb go into their paper doll. If you replaced all their body parts with bionics their new metal skeleton would suddenly start breathing. And when you knocked over a bank, you sure as hell made sure everyone within a thirty block radius knew about it. It was a game that repeatedly reinforced that sense that you were chucking around weighty resources and that you were getting an appropriate payoff for using them.

Satellite Reign couldn’t be more different. Take your primary method of money acquisition, for example. Despite what I said earlier, it isn’t stealing money from banks and corporations via the Magic Door – this merely supplements your primary income, which is gained from money siphons your Hacker installs on ATMs dotted throughout the game. Let me say that again: your primary source of income in Satellite Reign is literally stealing money from cash machines. That’s something two guys with a pickup truck could do, and it’s not something that particularly makes me feel like I’m in control of a company with vast resources at my beck and call. Are they the cyberpunk equivalent of a tech startup that’s made up of a couple of guys “working” out of the local coffee shop? Have they ever heard of corporate finance? Seed capital? I guarantee you they’d get more money by walking in the front door of the bank and asking for a loan instead of hacking the sodding ATMs. Maybe then they could afford an actual R&D department that isn’t composed of seven random hobos you found on the street and slipped a couple of hundred bucks to to be part of your scrappy startup.

Research itself I don’t actually have that many complaints about (apart from the pathetic amounts of money involved); it takes place in real time as you carry out missions and is faster or slower based on the number of researchers/amount of cash you’re willing to invest. There’s no tech tree in Satellite Reign: instead, you can only research the weapon and equipment prototypes that you’ve pulled out of your compound assaults, which is your primary motivator for hitting them in the first place. At first glance it looks like there’s a decent range of weapons, but that’s just because they’re split out into three types: ballistic, lasers and plasma. Ballistic weapons are all-rounders, while plasma and lasers are particularly effective against armour and shields respectively. There’s plasma and laser versions of the standard assault rifle, plasma and laser miniguns, a plasma shotgun, plasma and laser pistols etc. etc., but what soon becomes apparent is that there are no explosive weapons in here. All of these guns fire bullets, or bullet equivalents. In fact the only moderately destructive item you’ll have access to for most of the game are the Fragmentation grenades you can unlock via the Soldier’s skill tree. This is staggeringly unimaginative. It’s not until about halfway through the game (later if you take a roundabout route like I did) that you get access to the Plasma Cannon, which is somewhat explodey, and satchel charges only unlock in the final area. I find this lack of decent toys tragically ironic for a game that’s named after a signature weapon in Syndicate Wars that involved using a targeting laser to drop hypervelocity tungsten rods from an orbiting satellite down onto your target’s head, which incidentally incinerated an extremely wide portion of the surrounding area.

(Satellite Reign misses another trick by having its bionic augmentations be simple stat/ability upgrades that fill in boxes on your agents’ stat sheets instead of being reflected visually in their appearance in any way. I’m not asking for them to do any expensive modification of 3D assets here, I just wanted something a little more significant than a tiny icon that the project artist knocked out in five minutes.)

I think the game’s reluctance to let you play with anything truly destructive is linked to two things. One is that the City is decidedly non-destructible; it looks great, but is 100% a collection of static, immutable objects. It’d be a bit dumb if you fired satellite weaponry at a building and it didn’t explode, and so I do sort of understand if they didn’t want to get as silly about it as Syndicate Wars did. That would be giving the developers the benefit of the doubt, however, as I suspect the real reason you’re not handed any explosives is because it would make combat absolutely trivial. Even the Soldier’s grenades – which only have a moderate radius and won’t kill anyone who isn’t a light guard unless you catch them right in the middle of the blast zone — are game-breakingly powerful because the guard AI loves to cluster up. Explosions knock guards prone, and when they’re prone they lose any cover bonuses they might have had, making it very easy to finish them off when they’re on the ground. Soldier grenades are at least limited; if you had anything more plentiful or with a wider blast radius you’d just blow everything up all the time.

Even now I’m not convinced that would be a bad thing, though, because as tough and numerous as they are the most difficult part of Satellite Reign’s combat isn’t fighting the guards, it’s fighting the bugs in the combat control and line-of-sight systems. As an example, when your agents are right next to guards they’ll hit them with a punchy melee attack instead of shooting them when you right click them. And when they are right next to guards this is fine. Unfortunately Satellite Reign has a very broad interpretation of the phrase “right next to” and chooses to believe this includes guards up to twenty feet away from the agent in question. If they’re not close enough to melee the guard they’ll leisurely jog out of cover to do it while the guard shoots them in the face.

I have a simple solution to this problem that doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Satellite Reign developers: if, when the player right clicks on an enemy, the agent in question isn’t close enough to melee said enemy, just have them shoot the fucker instead. That’s probably what they want to do anyway. There’s also bugs where the game doesn’t register clicks on abilities, bugs where sometimes when you try and hide your squad behind a piece of cover it’ll decide to leave one facing in the opposite direction so that they can get shot in the back, bugs in the pathfinding when you use abilities such as the Infiltrator melee attack that result in the Infiltrator getting “lost” on the way to the guard you’ve targeted. Worse are the line-of-sight issues, where a guard will be behind cover shooting your agents while they unerringly guide their return fire into a lamppost that’s ten feet in front of them, or the poorly-communicated range of your weapons, which is sometimes shorter than those of the weapons the guards are using and which will result in them (again) gamely trotting out of cover to get into range, often weathering a storm of gunfire to do so. It’s insanely frustrating to see a guard sending out an alert, telling the squad to focus fire on him, and them being unable to bring him down in time despite their sheer firepower because of some quirk of the scenery or the agent behaviour.

Ugh. Despite appearances, the main reason Satellite Reign makes me so angry isn’t because it isn’t Syndicate. There are some fundamental philosophical differences between me and the game but I try not to be too harsh on it for that since that’s a completely subjective disagreement. What bothers me about it is that it actually does an awful lot that’s really, really good. Or could have been really, really good, given an additional few months of polishing and balancing. The agents are great. The City looks great. I think the combat, as painful as it is now, could really go somewhere if they ironed out the bugs. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of the compounds, they just need the time and resources to inject them with a little more variety and individuality and not have every single one finish with a Magic Door. Playing it now, though, it doesn’t quite come across as a mess, but it is disjointed and very much unfinished. And that is a real shame, because I have a haunting feeling this is the only swipe somebody will take at redoing Syndicate for a very long time; Satellite Reign doesn’t seem to be doing well enough to justify a sequel or anyone else getting in on the action, and so it’ll probably be left to languish in the annals of history. In a way, that’s the worst thing about Satellite Reign: even behind all of the bugs, limitations and hurried design choices, it proved the concept still worked well, and it could have been amazing. Hopefully the devs will patch out the worst of the issues and the game will do well in the Christmas sale; as it stands, though, Satellite Reign is a tragic missed opportunity.

The post Thoughts: Satellite Reign appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

On holiday this week, so here’s the second of my recent excursions into Bullfrog’s glory days.

My love for Syndicate is something that I find difficult to express in words. It’s a game expressly calculated to appeal to both the 10 year-old version of me and the current gnarled oak of a man I have become. It’s all about trenchcoat-clad cyborgs fighting gang wars with weaponry ranging from Uzis to rocket launchers, all in the middle of a living city where innocent bystanders are routinely incinerated in the crossfire from your obscenely powerful guns — and if that idea doesn’t at least catch a glimmer of your interest then I don’t know what to tell you. Probably you’re not going to be very interested in Syndicate. Probably you’ve also had the joy surgically removed from every other aspect of your life, but I try not to judge.

For the rest of us, Syndicate is possibly the landmark Bullfrog title. People still rave about Syndicate, even today, and it’s pretty easy to see why: it’s the first thing¹ they made that was expressly designed as a game first rather than a system. Populous made the mistake of the system being the game, which is why the reaction to it today is… well, it’s pretty much the one I had when I wrote the last one of these; it’s acknowledged as a remarkable technological achievement but there’s a rather lukewarm reaction towards actually playing the thing. Syndicate still has the open world, autonomous system that all the Bullfrog games are known for, but it stands in stark contrast to Populous by making this system — the city environment — a backdrop for the player’s actions within it rather than the be-all and end-all of Syndicate itself. Sitting on top of the city is something that is very explicitly game-y: a squad of four cyborg agents ordered around the streets with the left mouse button and who will gun down anyone sitting under the mouse cursor given a cue from the right mouse button. Each mission in Syndicate has a concrete objective — assassinate this target, persuade that target, eliminate all rival syndicate agents in the city — but doesn’t tell you how you should be going about it; instead it just dumps your agents into the mission city, gives you a target marker and leaves you to get on with it.

These days this seems like a pretty token amount of structure for a game, but it did wonders for Syndicate’s coherency when compared to Populous. Syndicate isn’t anywhere near as open or sprawling a game as Populous, but that’s a good thing; the bits it cut were fairly flabby and abstract anyway, and what’s left is a pretty focused experience that plays very well to its theme, rather than the theme being an ill-fitting mask for an already-existing system. For example, rather than having Syndicate’s fifty levels be a simple linear progression from one to another, Bullfrog made the effort of contextualising each level by presenting it as a region on the world map. By completing the missions you gradually spread the stain of your syndicate’s colour across the globe, and — importantly — there’s a limited degree of choice given to the player as to which mission they attempt next, as any region that’s adjacent to territory you control will be open for a takeover. There’s also a point to doing the missions that goes beyond “You have to in order to finish the game,” since each region you take over pays tax that funds your R&D labs’ efforts to develop new and better ways of killing people.

The R&D portion of Syndicate would probably be considered pretty basic today – aside from improved body modifications for your agents there’s maybe twelve things to research, half of which are pretty useless — but it nevertheless provides an invaluable sense of progression to Syndicate. The body mods are expensive as hell to both research and install, but they provide your agents with dramatic performance boosts, making them faster, more resilient and more accurate. An agent with only Level 1 arms will spray lead all over the place when firing his Minigun, wasting ammo and increasing Time to Kill², but the same agent with Level 3 arms will fire every single bullet dead-on to the spot where you point your mouse cursor. As for the weapons, the blind research in Syndicate (you can only direct your efforts into one of four very vague research areas) allows you to work your way from basic pistols and shotguns to Uzis, and then to Miniguns, and then to lasers and the infamous Gauss Gun — these days we take the term “Gauss gun” to refer to magnetically accelerated weaponry, but in Syndicate it’s just a fancy name for an immensely destructive rocket launcher. Like most games there’s a point where you have so much money that it ceases to mean anything, but for the first two thirds of Syndicate fully outfitting an agent with the cutting edge in weapons and cyborg implants is ruinously expensive, which in turn makes your otherwise faceless stooges investments to be protected.

They’re still expendable, mind. Replacing dead agents is a setback, but it’s a price you might end up paying given how violent Syndicate’s combat is. I’m actually a little surprised there wasn’t more of a GTA-esque outcry over it at the time since it inevitably involves the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the dozens. It might be entirely inadvertent, but unless you’ve upgraded your agents with the maximum Arms tech the spread on their weapons means they’re going to catch passers-by in the hail of lead they unleash when they return fire on enemy agents. Because the weapons do include flamethrowers and rocket launchers it’s kind of hard to discriminate when hordes of trenchcoated cyborgs are throwing themselves at your beleaguered team; the wandering-around-on-fire-screaming animations seem a little tame today, but 10 year-old me was very impressed with them at the time. And that’s without even getting into the thing most people remember Syndicate for: using the Persuadertron to press-gang the city’s population into your own private army.

The Persuadertron seems like one of the leftovers from Populous that went very, very right. It’s a magic doodad that brainwashes anybody standing near your agents to your side; basic civilians are converted instantly, while guards, police and enemy agents require a successively greater critical mass of already-converted personnel, but if you have the Persuadertron equipped sooner or later you’re going to be trailing a crowd of converted citizens behind you. These citizens are unswervingly loyal: armed citizens such as the police will fire their weapons at targets when you do, while unarmed civilians will go so far as to arm themselves with weapons dropped by fallen enemies so that they can join in the shooting. They’ll suffer terrible losses if you get into any kind of serious battle, but each bullet they stop is one less that hits your agents. It feels almost like an afterthought that Bullfrog chucked in because it was a shame to have this living city environment that you could only really interact with by killing the population, but it’s one that reinforces the central theme of Syndicate: that life is cheap, and any amount of collateral damage is acceptable as long as you get the job done for your corporate pa ymasters.

Syndicate is a great example of Bullfrog’s imaginative system design being properly harnessed into an actual game; by focusing down the gameplay from influencing an entire tribe to control of just four agents while compensating the player with a degree of choice on the strategic layer it comes across as a much more coherent experience than Populous, even today. It’s creaking a little bit these days – the UI, vehicles and inventory are all pretty painful to use– but I found it was still perfectly playable, and more than that, it was still enjoyable.

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The post Bullfrog Time Machine: Syndicate appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog you’re probably aware that I quite like Syndicate. The two Bullfrog games are classics, and while it’s a shame Bullfrog never really made a successful transition to full 3D environments it did mean that that it was impossible for the series to be diluted with a series of creatively braindead me-too sequels hoping to cash in on the Syndicate “franchise”, which I have no doubt would have happened if they’d continued to make games under the thumb of EA before their eventual assimilation into the collective. Still, the words “creatively bankrupt” do not even begin to describe the modern entertainment industry, which will never take a chance on a new IP when it can jam an older, popular one on top of whatever new thing they’re working on, no matter how badly it fits. Last year it was Syndicate’s turn to be disinterred from its peaceful and dignified place of last repose and resurrected as an FPS. This year I finally got around to playing it.

I’m not inherently against the basic concept of a Syndicate FPS. Its roots as an action strategy game mean it’s rather better equipped to leap that particular genre chasm than, say, the XCOM shooter; part of Syndicate has always been about the guns and the indiscriminate carnage, and so an FPS adaptation at least has something to work with there. Cybernetic upgrades allow for the quasi-RPG mechanics so beloved of today’s shooters, while the plentiful mission variety found in the original games would transfer across quite well and provide a decent base for the level design Syndicate Wars in particular also had a world rich with atmosphere and backstory which could definitely benefit a modern-day rendering of the concept. To its credit Syndicate does make at least some use of these elements and has sold me on the idea of a Syndicate FPS. What it hasn’t done is sold me on the idea that this Syndicate FPS is a particularly good one.

Now, to be fair to Syndicate I ended up liking it rather more than I was expecting to. I was expecting to hate the thing as it appeared to embody everything I loathe about AAA game development these days. So I was quite surprised to see that Syndicate ended up doing two things rather well indeed: it provides a terrifying glimpse into the future of augmented reality displays, and it also has one of the better implementations of player character presence in and interaction with the game world that I’ve seen in recent years. By that latter one I mean that in Syndicate you’re not just a disembodied eye floating two metres above the ground with a gun welded to the bottom of your vision; instead when you look down at the ground you’ll be able to see your body and feet, you’ll be able to bump into things realistically, you’ll be able to move around with a real sense of momentum (for the five seconds that the game will let you sprint for, anyway), and your character – a total cipher going by the name of Agent Miles Kilo – will even automatically switch gun hands when he’s trying to poke the thing out around the left side of a piece of cover. This is a key, key thing that most FPSes just flat out ignore in favour of having a static protagonist, and while I can understand that that’s much easier from a development and implementation point of view, having the protagonist be reactive to their environment as they are in Syndicate adds a great deal to player immersion. It’s kind of the whole point in using first-person perspective in the first place, and in terms of actually making you think you are there in the game world Syndicate does the best job I’ve seen since Mirror’s Edge.

As far as that game world goes it’s kind of a mixed bag, though. Visually it hits all the right notes for a cyberpunk future; I can’t decide if Syndicate’s world seeming rather sterile and lifeless means that they failed somewhere in terms of their art design or if they succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. My augmented reality comment earlier was a bit of a snipe, because while Syndicate’s UI is supposed to be one of those flashy futuristic things that’s chipped straight into your character’s visual cortex what it’s mainly used for is highlighting mundane things in the game world such as chairs and drinks machines and giving them helpful labels such as “chair” and “drinks machine”.  At first I was aghast that they had included such a blindingly pointless and unhelpful feature in the game (mainly because it brings up a loading bar and you wait to see if it’s anything interesting and then it says “This is a chair”, resulting in a repeated waste of your time until you learn to ignore it) but then I realised that this is basically what Google Glass is going to do, making it not so much banal as it is depressingly accurate. This is actually what augmented reality vision is going to be used for in the future, and Syndicate just figures we should start on it a little earlier than we could otherwise. I guess it’s just a mercy it didn’t use it to inflict targeted advertising on the player character a la Minority Report.

Anyway, aside from labelling things what Syndicate’s flashy futuristic cybernetic capabilities are used for, mostly, is pushing buttons at a distance; there’s a lot of puzzles in the game that amount to “push button to lower lift”, except they’re dressed up as “hack system on other side of lift shaft to lower lift”.  I have to say I found this rather disappointing, since it’s a rather annoying thing about games which are set in the near-future and which feature extensive amounts of bio-augmentation that they don’t really explore the gameplay possibilities offered by bionic limbs and artificial skeletons. I’d have loved to play a game where I could buy upgrades that would make me run faster, jump higher and hit harder; the first two seem like they would have been particularly appropriate given the intense physicality of Syndicate’s world interaction. Instead you just get three active chip-hacking abilities which are functionally identical (make baddies kill themselves, make baddies kill each other and then themselves, and knock baddies over so that you can kill them with a single bullet) and a bunch of passive upgrades you can spend points on by periodically wrenching the chips out of your enemies’ heads. The passive upgrades are incredibly underwhelming and don’t do anything to move Syndicate away from being a basic run-and-gun shooter, while the active abilities are a bit better but end up being just another kind of weapon. There are occasional inventive uses of the chip UI during boss and special enemy encounters – I did like being able to quickly hack grenades that were thrown at me and then throwing them right back – but otherwise it’s startlingly unimaginative, like the developers were too scared to try pushing people out of their comfort zone with the possibilities the Syndicate IP provided.

And that statement pretty much sums up Syndicate in a nutshell, really. Despite its superficial resemblance to Syndicate what’s under the hood is a depressingly conventional shooter where you progress down a linear path killing baddies while occasionally hammering F in a quicktime event. There’s boss fights (most of which were inoffensive enough, but there’s one which was eye-gougingly terrible and annoying and took me seven reloads to finish), there’s on-rails turret sections — there’s just about everything you would expect to find in an FPS these days, in fact, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The core of the game is like somebody went down a checklist ticking off all the generic shooter features without any real thought as to whether the final product would be engaging or fun or how they would tie into the overall plot of the game (which is complete balls, since you ask). That Syndicate just about held my interest until the end was largely down to the good work that’s been done on basic enemy design; there’s baddies with armour that you have to briefly make vulnerable with your chip, baddies with jammers that shut down chip functions and who have to be targeted first, and (a great achievement) invisible baddies that are actually fun to fight, all of whom serve to spice things up and prevent things from devolving into enemy whack-a-mole. Sadly, for every good idea Syndicate has I can point to two bad ones that drag it back down into the mire of mediocrity that most shooters inhabit these days, and while I’d definitely rather play a Syndicate than a CoD or a Battlefield (single player), when all is said and done I’ll still lump it in the same box as those two because Syndicate doesn’t quite do enough to properly distinguish itself from them.

A final word on Syndicate’s relationship to the overall Syndicate IP: does it make decent use of it? In certain areas, yes it does. There are points in the game – generally when you’re just about as far from a quicktime event as you can get – where you really do feel like this cybernetically-enhanced badass rampaging through a city in pursuit of a corporate goal. There was one particularly good bit close to the start where Miles drops down into a nightclub and has a running gun battle with enemy security forces while terrified civilians scramble for cover, making target identification difficult unless you choose to indiscriminately gun everyone down to make your job easier. That was Syndicate; it’s not about running down a corridor while bad guys pop out from behind cover like they’re in a target gallery, it’s about a peaceful city that’s unaware of your presence suddenly exploding into bloody violence as you try to complete your mission heedless of the collateral damage. The nightclub was what convinced me that a Syndicate FPS didn’t necessarily have to end badly, and that if structured and executed correctly it could have given the IP a new lease of life. That Syndicate FPS is not this Syndicate FPS, though. Starbreeze did a better job with it than I expected, but it’s still nowhere near good enough.

(And no, I didn’t try the co-op despite hearing that it was pretty good because nobody on my Origin friends list owns Syndicate. )

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The news that GoG are going to be adding the original Syndicate to their store on Thursday caused many parts of the internet to explode in an orgy of fangasmic joy. Syndicate is rightfully regarded as one of the all-time classics of gaming, which is one of the reasons why the news of the FPS reboot has gone down like a cold cup of sick with most of the gaming community. It’s a fairly simple top-down shooter at heart, but its masterstroke was putting the shooter bits into context by setting them as individual missions on a vast, world-spanning strategic map. This strategic layer let you tax your captured territories and plow the resulting funds into researching ever more lethal weapons and bionic body parts for your team of drugged-up cyborgs, providing the sort of wholesome family entertainment that led to entirely-predictable calls for it to be banned¹.

Adding this sort of overall meaning to a game that otherwise remains limited in its scope is almost always a good idea – the Mercenaries games are the most fondly-remembered of the Mechwarrior series, while the Total War series built its entire reputation on detailed battlefields littered with hundreds of corpses that nevertheless represented only a single clash of armies in the wider struggle for control of a vast empire. We’re more invested in a game if we have some say in the direction it takes, and the more freedom the game gives us to choose that direction the better – which is why an FPS reboot that will no doubt end up being a linear series of scripted missions with a few RPG-lite character upgrades as the sole concession to choice is completely missing the goddamn point. The fans are rightfully up in arms over that one because the original game is so fondly remembered. You will rarely hear them mention the sequel, however, which is odd because I think it’s by far the superior game.

The original Syndicate wasn’t perfect. It suffered from more than a few flaws. Most of them were down to technological limitations inherent in what was a very ambitious game for 1993 technology, but the one I hold it truly accountable for is that it’s more than a little light on world-building. Perhaps it’s too much to ask from a game that’s nearly two decades old at this point, but I remember the manual had a huge amount of background information that never made it into the game proper. While the mission briefings do their best they end up being hamstrung by the necessity of having to devote most of their words to telling the player what they have to do. The missions themselves are all entirely standalone, disposable entities where you’re dropped into a sandbox city that’s visually identical to the other dozen sandbox cities you’ve visited and told to kill a guy/kill a bunch of guys/persuade a guy. And let’s not even get into the game never following up on its amazing intro with an equivalent outro².

Syndicate Wars was released three years after the original in 1996, and it more than makes good on this defect. In fact it does one of the most effective jobs of creating a compelling world and atmosphere that I’ve ever seen. In order to do this it has to be more overtly linear than the original game (although it provides almost the same amount of choice in terms of mission selection) but that’s a worthwhile tradeoff; there are fewer missions, but they have more meaning. The world of Syndicate Wars is directly channelling the dystopian cyberpunk vibe of Blade Runner and early William Gibson novels, and this bleeds through in almost every aspect of its presentation. Like the original game the strategic layer is presented as the holographic interface of a controlling Eurocorp executive mastermind, but thanks to three years of technology development it looks sleeker and far more futuristic.  The game’s story is all about an unexpected assault on the all-powerful Eurocorp Syndicate by a religious organisation called the Church of the New Epoch, which subverts Eurocorp’s control of the global population and brings the syndicate to its knees. The Church makes up the second faction in the game, with the player able to choose between working for Eurocorp or the Church at the start of the campaign. This isn’t just a palette swap either, with the Church campaign being fundamentally distinct from Eurocorp’s; a player who picks the Church will play through the same storyline but they’ll do it from the Church’s perspective – where the first Eurocorp mission is an attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of a once-mighty corporation, the first Church mission involves infecting Eurocorp’s global network with the virus that crippled them in the first place. The differences even show up in subtle things like the tech descriptions, where Eurocorp’s blurb takes a scientific approach that stands in stark contrast to the Church acolytes unquestioningly accepting new technology as a gift from their messianic religious leaders.

Oh yes, the “religious” leaders. The Church of the New Epoch isn’t a church built around God but instead worships technology. They field technology that is many years in advance of what the Syndicate’s scientists are capable of, and the wellspring of this technology is a document called the Codex which was written by the Church’s leaders. Who are these leaders, where did they come from, and how do they have access to such advanced technology? The Eurocorp storyline is all about piecing the syndicate back together while trying to resolve this mystery, and it’s made all the more interesting with the introduction of a third unplayable faction, the Unguided. These are literal cyberpunks– individuals who have broken free of Eurocorp’s control but who also reject the teachings of the Church. Dealing with the Unguided rebellion distracts Eurocorp but also ends up posing problems for the Church given the identity of the Unguided leader.

Gameplay-wise, Syndicate Wars is a little bit Marmite. Most people viewed it as a fine game, but one which was somewhat worse than the original because of some of the changes made. I’m not one of these people, but I can certainly see their argument; some of the changes Bullfrog made in order to address criticisms of the original alter the gameplay in fairly fundamental ways. The most obvious example is the universal ammo system. In the original Syndicate guns had a limited supply of ammo, and once they’d run out of bullets/energy/rockets/whatever the gun was useless. This led to the absurd situation where each of your four agents would be carting around eight miniguns under his trenchcoat, with each minigun essentially acting as an additional magazine. Bullfrog’s solution to this for Syndicate Wars was to introduce some fluff where all guns – even projectile weapons – now fire slugs of energy that are powered by a small fusion reactor contained within the agent’s cyborg body. Since they’re all running off of the same power source they all use the same ammo; exhaust the ammunition supply for your minigun in Syndicate Wars and you can’t just switch to another weapon. Instead you have to wait, defenceless, while the agent’s power plant recharges.

Now, if you ask me this introduces an interesting gameplay challenge in that the player now has to think about the best way to end a fight quickly. Engaging in a protracted gun battle puts you at a disadvantage; you need to strike hard and fast and then back off while your ammo replenishes. I enjoyed this gameplay change, but other people hated it – and I can’t exactly say they were wrong to do so when it was essentially placing an artificial limitation on the way they played the game. Certain of the other alterations are more overtly bad; Syndicate Wars is a fully 3D game which came out at a time when 3D gaming environments were in their infancy. As a result it has all the unwelcome baggage you’d expect an early 3D game to have vis-à-vis the control system (especially for flying vehicles) and the camera³. Finally you can no longer raise money through taxing territories and selling pilfered equipment; instead your main source of income is robbing banks via demolishing them with high explosives and making off with the cash, with the occasional armoured car robbery thrown in for good measure. Pulling off these in-game heists is very entertaining, but if you don’t know where these banks are (and the game doesn’t exactly go out of its way to tell you) you can quickly run out of money for researching and upgrading your agents.

Gameplay-wise, then, Syndicate Wars is a rather flawed beast just like its predecessor. As a game, though, it provides a far more coherent and full-fat experience; the player actively wants to unravel the storyline and beat the Church, which is a big improvement on taking on the hordes of faceless syndicate agents that were the primary foes of the original. This goes back to what I said at the start about giving the individual gameplay elements of a game some wider context that provides them with meaning. Most games opt to do this with a storyline. Some games opt to do it through player choice. A rare few, however, manage to combine the two elements – this is the reason why I find the true RPG classics so damn compelling, and the same is true for Syndicate Wars. As with all old games it might be a little bit painful for somebody to go back and play today, but you should at the very least take a look at this unofficial Syndicate bible (EDIT: link dead, removing) as it’s got most of the world-building bits that didn’t take place in-mission. And if that induces you to track down a copy of the game, then so much the better.

1. If the internet existed in 1993 this is the part where I’d provide some sort of link as documentary evidence. Since it didn’t (at least not in the sense that it does today) you’ll just have to take my word for it.
2. I mean this quite literally. Syndicate doesn’t have an outro, or an ending of any kind. Once you finish the final mission it dumps you straight back to the main menu with no fanfare whatsoever.
3. The plus side is that Syndicate Wars’ city environments are – again – very atmospherically cyberpunk, which is a massive step forward from the original’s identikit brown industrial parks.

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