After the great Syndicate and American Revolt, Bullfrog was really dealing with a huge fan community (for the time anyway) and Syndicate Wars was expected as some kind of grail for gamers. It took for ever to complete and every time we caught glipses of the coming sequel, we would jump in the air, eager to get our hands on the beast.
Syndicate and Wars, which is our concern here, are two games where you control a team of cyborg agents and have to complete various objectives like killing the enemies' agents, converting people to your cause, killing cops, retrieving stuff, assassinate someone... Your ultimate goal is to take over the entire world and you do it region by region (country by country but one is called Europe, so it is not that detailed geographically). You have a squad of 4 guys and you can equip them before every mission. The more mission you complete, the more money you get for better equipment and better upgrades for you cyborgs.
Historically, Syndicate is one of the very first strategy/action games, it was in real time, you can in some measure, chose your next mission, you can research new upgrades for your agents' arms, legs... You can virtually do anything you wanted in this game, convert normal citizen to your cause (they would pick up weapons from dead bodies and help you, drive vehicles (only on the street though) and even convert your enemies to your side (my personal favourite).
Syndicate wars take all the good stuff from the previous one and expand on it. How? By integrating true 3d environment, you can rotate the world and see hidden enemies, you can turn the camera in any direction and control the battlefield perfectly. One problem is that the camera is not handled very well, it gets stuck behind buildings and when you turn around, you get stuck inside or behind buildings sometimes and cannot see anything.
Otherwise, the system is pretty much the same but the enemies are way more dangerous and clever (not very bright, but not as suicidal as they used to be in the first one). In this game, you'll have to plan carefully your mission right from mission 1 or it's going to be game over immediately. The difficulty is very hard, herder than the first game's expansion, which was already considered as a joke for its difficulty level.
As for sound, I really cannot say for I never had the chance to play it with the sound, I did not have a sound card at the time and played the abandonware version the same way.
If it is so hard, and if the gameplay suffers from camera problems, why play this game? Because it's absolutely gorgeous for the time! It's in full 3d for the maps, destructible objects all over the place and real intense action all the way through. For anyone who likes UFO but is frustrated by the turn based combat, for anyone who enjoys squad based games and action shooter, this is a MUST TRY. You might not get into it, the camera might curse your experience and the game might just not look so good today, I guarantee that if you do get over the hard start, you'll want to play that game till the end and will find how deep it is.
Written by:
~kimvidard
