Syndicate (DOS)

By: The J Man

The future is a dire place for the civilians of the world. First came great wars and conquests for new territories, changing the political landscape of the globe as nations bickered, swallowed each other up, and redrew boundary lines. Then came the corporations, which grew in power and wealth until they eventually could buy out the very nations that hosted them. Then came the Syndicates, using brutal force and insatiable greed to infiltrate and control the corporations and their territories, taxing the populous into oblivion while mind control and propaganda keep them in line and productive.

Quiet, pensive Joe Civilian ponders these issues as best he can as he toddles off to work in his nice business suit and classy shoes. As he crosses the street, three men with trench coats appear from behind a distant corner and run toward him. To his right, four similarly-dressed men in helmets recieve new orders from their controller floating high above the city. On command, they each produce belt-fed miniguns from under the folds of their jackets. Joe doesn't even have time for a final thought before the helmeted agents fire 400 rounds through his body and into their charging foes. Despite all the oppression, the worst threat to the civilians of the future will actually be you.

Syndicate is cyberpunk at its most jaded. This real-time tactical title casts you as an executive in an up-and-coming corporation of your own design. You'll pick your name, color, and logo, and do your damndest to spread the stain of your greed across the entire globe. Every nation begins under the control of a rival syndicate. The population and their taxable wealth must be wrested from your competition by way of hostile invasion. You'll deploy a maximum of four agents per mission - armed and cybernetically enhanced to your choosing - and complete some specific goal while fending off enemy operatives inside that city. Meanwhile, civilians and police go about their day, oblivious to your little urban war until they get caught in the bloody crossfire. Slaying innocents doesn't benefit you, but it has absolutely no repercussions either. You can view this as either a classic cyberpunk statement on society's ever-shrinking morality, or just a minor obstacle to your ruthlessness.

Soon it will all be mine! Miiiiiinnnneeeeeee! AHHAHAHAHA!

Gameplay is broken out pretty distinctly into management and mission sections. On the management side of things, you start with the global view screen, showing your territories and those in control of your rivals. You can invade any territory bordering your own. This allows you some freedom of choice in picking missions and your path to global domination, but also allows the designers to corral your progress into levels of increasing difficulty. European missions will be easy, while the difficulty scales significantly as you sweep across Asia or down into Africa. By the time you hit Argentina, or the mysterious Atlantic Accelerator, you'd better have your shit totally together.

You tax the citizens of your territories from this screen, at percentages from 0 to 99. Doing it right is a constant balancing act. I tried for some time to find the magic number I could apply to everyone, and thus bypass this responsibility while still raking in the maximum amounts of dough, but this never worked in practice. The Urals would be delighted to pay a 51% rate one day, while Kazakhstan grumbled about 15%. You could set low rates for all and forget this part of the game, but you'll have a hard time making quick and significant progress. Instead, the idea is to squeeze the populous to the breaking point, then back off before a rebellion breaks out. Rebellions require you to replay that nation's mission to regain control. This won't matter for earlier missions where your now highly-developed veteran operatives can simply saunter in and waste four guys packing nothing but shotguns, but for the tougher missions, it's well worth avoiding.

More amoral corporate thinking: chop out those inefficient human parts and replace them with better investments.

The next management screen sets up a mission briefing where you'll review the location of your assignment and its objectives. Missions always take place in cities or industrial compounds, but their goals maintain some great variety. Assassinations, rescues, urban pacification, combat sweeps, and more await you with clever briefings and backstories behind each one. There is no set way in how you're supposed to complete them, and no intended "optimal" solution. You can try to send in one agent to quickly dive in, hit the target, and escape, or march a full squad of four through, blasting cops and rivals as you go. The only real guarantee is that there will always be action and violence. Hope you have no qualms about walking into a house and gunning down a former director's wife. Or being sent into a city to kill every police officer on the streets. Or leading an embezzler to his death by brainwashing him with your "Persuadertron". Yes, his handiwork is apparent - any game featuring a Persuadertron has a strong change of being developed by Peter Molyneux.

The briefing screen also allows you purchase a wider view of the mission area or additional information, some of which is helpful, most of which isn't. Learning that your target's guards are lightly armed won't change your loadout because this assessment doesn't include the heavily-armed enemy syndicate agents present in every mission. I once took a briefing saying opposition was to be "light" and armed with pistols as meaning just that - but they were only talking about the human guards, not the cybernetic death squad with laser guns. And it's not just a case of intentionally surprising you as part of the story. You will fight syndicate agents every time, no matter what.

Once you're satisfied with your intel, the final screen lets you select your four agents and their equipment. A list on the right shows all your available gear, with eight inventory slots for each agent. You also have the power to fit your agents with cybernetic limbs, noticeably raising their abilities and resistance to damage. Research is covered from this screen as well. You select from general topics like "assault" or "heavy" weapons, allocate funds, and wait for your new toy to arrive. Nothing takes longer than ten days to research, but shortening that time takes a surprising amount of cash. If you're lucky enough to pick up an unresearched weapon off an enemy agent, you can cut its research time and cost in half, often while skipping ahead in the research tree.

Missions are played real-time in an isometric view as you float over the mission zone in a control blimp. You can pan around independent of your squad and scout out the area or track down a proper path to your target. A window in the lower left corner always tracks the area around your agents, and if one of them is carrying a scanner, shows dots for nearby civilians, police, hostile agents, and a pulse from the direction of the mission's target. All actions are controlled with the mouse. Left-clicking directs your agents to that point, right clicking fires their weapons wherever your mouse is pointed. You can control each individually or all members of the team in a group mode. You can also direct their movements by clicking inside the scanner window, which is especially useful in guiding them through or around buildings blocking your view. Buildings do not turn invisible and the camera cannot be rotated, as in later, similar games. This is a pain since targets can be located inside houses and out of your view, but passable, thanks to the navigating ability of the scanner window and judicious use of IPA.

Cities maintain a believable, futuristic look.

IPA stands for Intelligence, Perception, and Adrenaline. They're three drugs whose levels basically determine the AI behavior and abilities of your agents. The concept is basic enough - jack up their Perception and they'll aim better, take up their Adrenaline and they'll react faster. The default baselines for these drugs are frequently good enough for any situation, as long as you are directly controlling the agents and their aim at all times. But if you need to leave them alone for a bit while you scout ahead with the camera, or need to send them into a building where they will be out of your direct sight and control, jack up Intelligence and Adrenaline and shoo them inside to blast whatever moves. A panic mode is available by smashing both mouse buttons down, which sends the levels for all three drugs skyrocketing. The agents will then target enemies on their own, shoot quickly and accurately, and generally become a hell of a lot more effective at standing their ground.

The tradeoff with any of the drugs is that these chemicals, whatever they are, have near-instant dependencies (shown by a darker bar filling the lighter one that marks the current dose). When the two line up, a white line indicating tolerance moves further from the center of the bar, shortening the length of any future drug shots and their effects. You can shift your dosage back to the left (I suppose by administering some kind of anti-drug) which takes the same amount of time to have a positive effect while leaving your agent at a lowered state of efficiency. Drug dependency doesn't carry over into future missions, which is why its effects are so exaggerated. But you certainly won't be able to panic mode multiple times in a mission without taking the time to treat the addiction. You also don't have to use this feature at all, but drug juggling is a useful option that can tip a failing mission back into your favor.

You can only acquire new agents by using the Persuadertron on enemy operatives. If an enemy corporation has already spent the cash to upgrade their cybernetics, captured agents keep those implants when they switch sides. Enemy weapons can be collected as well, which is useful since ammo costs half the price of the gun itself. Early in the game, recycling enemy weapons is cheaper than buying your own. Money saved dictates the on-ground power you're able to project into each mission, and thus how easy or hard each will be for you. You can't reload guns in the field, and dropped weapons have very limited ammo, so you'll want to bring along as many fully-loaded weapons as you can.

Time moves at an accelerated rate, about one day a minute, even while you're in missions. Luckily, countries won't suddenly go tits-up while you're out in the field. You'll almost always have enough time to see a country is "unhappy" and rectify the situation before they break into anarchy. The speedy days also mean you can leave the game running and build up great reserves of cash, which allows you to head in to the first missions with the money to afford the highest-level equipment.

Missions take place in well-developed cities that really sell the idea of the dim, urban future. Hovercars speed by on tracks, advertisements play from giant billboards, neon and fluorescent lights blaze against deteriorating concrete and dirty alleyways. The mood and art direction are definite high points, and create perfect cyberpunk environments for your shadowy agents and shadowy deeds.

Infilterate softly and carry a four-man firing squad.

The tactical combat sections have the best graphics and the juiciest gameplay, and should be what draws players to the game the most. But it is also where Syndicate will most readily show its flaws. The lack of fading buildings, especially when you're required to go into them for missions, is frustrating. Every city is also simply a redistribution of the same art assets from others - India will look exactly like New England. Difficulty can start to become an issue as well. Early missions are a blast, but later ones really start to get nasty. Enemy agents quickly get leg upgrades to run as fast as possible, chest armor to absorb bullets like paintballs, and massive guns to pound your team relentlessly. It's almost recommended to immediately find some defensible position, wait for the enemy agents to snake around a corner single-file, and shred them all as they come into range. It's pretty damn satisfying to watch them rip around that corner and right into a firing squad of four agents simultaneously blazing miniguns. But it's also a process that repeats so often that it starts to get stale.

Every level starts with a set number of enemy agents. Reinforcements don't "appear" or get loaded in for plot points or ambushes, so don't worry about surprises. They're usually set to some kind of "patrol" or "gangbang" AI and will, without even seeing you first, run at your starting position in a swarm like the Baseball Furies from The Warriors. You can elect to avoid them and rush straight toward your goal, but even if you speed by in a vehicle, agent weapons are strong enough to destroy it in just a second and kill any objective-related civilian you may have along for the ride. So basically, you'll need to hunt down all opposing agents in every mission before you can safely attend to your business.

AI isn't very smart, and pretty bad at navigating, so you can watch your agents and enemies run right into walls and then snake along them until they find the corner. Or get stuck on a corner trying to decide which way is shorter. Or enter a building with only one door, and keep pressing against the wall in an attempt to pass through it. If you simply click somewhere without babysitting waypoints, your elite team will frequently split up, lag behind, or have one member get stuck - not good when you're scrambling to get everyone into position before the bad guys arrive.

The interface isn't designed to separate your squad. You can't divide your team into groups or select some with a lasso function, only one or all. There's no easy way to send one to scout ahead while the others sneak around the back. There's no reliable way to have two guard a civilian target while the other two grab a hovercar for a getaway. You can use drugs to try and give an agent some level of autonomy while you attend to the others, but more often than not the lone wolf will wind up dead. It doesn't really matter, because you'll need all your firepower to get through the initial rush of agents. And later technology will hose you no matter what. Chests packed with bombs make for agents that can take out an entire street corner. They'll wreck your entire team if they can break through and get close enough. Flamethrowers can kill you almost instantly if you let their operator in range. And strong weapons that can pick agents off from safe distances are few and limited.

These issues start to add up over time, and the more you play, the more frustrated you'll start to get. It may come sooner for some people than others, but even with the ability to recall a saved game and lose no real progress, the loss of time starts to become too much. It's tough to keep playing when you can spend 10 minutes on a mission and have everyone blown apart by a chest bomb on the way to evac. It's hard to justify carefully setting up and kitting out your agents, when you're watching them get killed by a swarm of 30 enemy agents as they step off the train. Finally, the interface limits your options for true tactics. Better technology makes for more durable agents, but it still means that on your best day you'll defeat enemy syndicates because you spent a hell of a lot of money on cybernetics and were able to kill them all by hitting panic mode at the right time.

Syndicate is a very addictive and very enjoyable game, but I think eventually, everyone's going to hit a point of diminishing return. If you're not doing well, you'll reach a mission too consistently frustrating to continue. If you've got vaults of cash and are mopping up left and right, you'll grow complacent and bored. Rivals never encroach upon your territory, never pull any real tricks or deception, resulting in a game where you simply match raw firepower with greater raw firepower, or mash the panic buttons and watch your guys do all the work. Beautiful initial effort, a lot of fun to play, but there's obvious, grating room for improvement.

-reviewed 7/11/07 - game copyright 1993 Electronic Arts

A blast to play. Loads of creative missions. So addictive there's probably futuristic corporate drugs involved.

Gets frustrating easily. Really needed a better system for seeing inside or through buildings. Pretty bad pathfinding AI.

	8
	7
	7
	8
	80%

Syndicate on MobyGames
Manual at replacementdocs
Syndicate Unofficial Fan Site
Gameplay video on YouTube
Intro movie on YouTube