Syndicate uniquely ranks among my favourite games for one reason and one reason only: it gave me my first taste of open-world gaming. The ability to approach mission objectives in any way you saw fit was completely new to me, and I was immediately hooked. You were given an objective, and then set loose in a Cyberpunk-inspired game world that was as challenging as it was rewarding.
And Syndicate’s game world was one of the best I’ve ever encountered. A future where corporations slice and dice up the world up into territories and when they enter into ‘hostile takeovers’ they mean exactly that – they send in ruthless cyborg ‘Agents’ to eliminate the competition. As the shadowy head of one of these corporations it’s your task to take over the entire world, sector by sector, using these agents for missions including hostage snatch and grabs, assassinations, or all-out massacres of every enemy agent in the place.
As you undertake these various missions you must also take control of your corporation’s research and development – the game’s clever way of progression giving you the ability to equip your squad of agents with new and devastating weapons (oh, those miniguns…salivate) and upgrades to their cybernetic enhancements to make them faster and tougher to kill.
The game was presented as a map of the world, divided into sections, and you take your squad in to complete a single mission in each province. Succeed, and the province is yours, so eventually the sections of the globe turn to whatever colour you have selected for your corporation. The game itself is a very cool isometric view of futuristic cities (complete with Bladerunner-esque billboards), military bases, and funky floating installations, and you direct your squad of four agents using a simple point-and-click interface.
One of the most interesting and challenging aspects is that you are supposed to be viewing all this from an airship floating above the location, so you cannot see your agents, or the enemy agents, if you direct them to move behind a building or through a narrow alley. This made some of the missions downright nerve-wracking, hearing gunfire open up and not being able to see what was happening.
Another really interesting aspect to the game was the complete lack of punishment if your squad happened to gun down some of the many civilians wandering about the various cities. On the one hand you never needed to worry about them being caught in the crossfire (which happened a lot) but on the other hand if you wanted to round up a horde of innocents using a ‘Persuadertron’ (a gadget that would put anyone within range under mind control, forcing them to follow your squad like lost puppies), and then mercilessly mow them down with a minigun, the game would do nothing to stop you.
Just a word about the graphics. They are truly remarkable and were quite unique. As you’ll see from the in-mission screengrabs, they stand up well even now, a quarter-century after the game’s release. There are not many games from the early nineties you can say that about.
Sound design was a brilliant part of this game too. I will never forget the roar of those miniguns, but everything was spot on. I will also never forget the scream sound effects when enemies were on fire. It really was a pretty brutal game.
The only real drawback was that there was no real reward for finishing the game. This was especially galling given that the final mission was among the most punishingly difficult I have ever encountered in any game, ever. My first attempt to complete it ended after about five seconds as enemy agents swarmed in and gunned my hapless squad down before I had time to click on anything. This was the first game I’ve sat back and gone, ‘Oh, okay, game, that’s how it’s gonna be? Alright then. Let’s do this.’
But the difficulty of the missions progressed well in general (there was no difficulty setting selection) and you really needed to manage the RPG elements such as the R&D (and the taxation of provinces, which paid for it). In later missions you would come up against multiple squads of heavily-armed agents. If you went in with shotguns you were mincemeat. This required some trial-and-error to get the right mix of research for weapons and upgrading your agents, but thankfully the game had a great save system with ten slots and you could save before and after each mission.
Syndicate was also my first introduction to DLC. Not long after its release, Bullfrog put out an expansion called American Revolt, where you basically got to replay the North American continent section of the world map with new missions. Needless to say I dove right in to that.
The very fact that simply compiling this article, doing screengrabs etc, had me wanting to begin a new game and play this one all over again, is testament to how great this game is. Its sequel, Syndicate Wars, was not a bad game, but it was more geared toward consoles and was damn disappointing when compared to this one. The story, gameplay, UI, almost everything about Syndicate just fires on all cylinders. It’s a truly great game that actually does stand the test of time, and is a no-brainer for inclusion in this list.
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