The future. World goverments have fallen and the entire planet is ruled by a set of large corporations, known as The Syndicates. To general public, these are known as the good benefactors, providing each land with food, supplies and police, which protects their citizens. What they do not know is that behind the curtains a global war is raging on. A struggle for power.

“Syndicate” is an action packed mission-based strategy game, where you play role of a syndicate leader. Your goal: total world domination, which you will obtain using your army of cybernetically enhanced humans (“agents”). Entire world has been divided into 50 areas, which you must subsequently conquer. Depending on the country, mission objectives will vary: it might be kidnapping of a scientist or acquisition of a specific object. It might be assasination of a politician or another influential persona. Finally, the goal might be simply to exterminate all enemies in the area, a type of mission which increases your blood pressure to the maximum. “Syndicate” is a game of various tasks, a definite plus which doesn’t make it so dull (at least not in the beginning).

However, in order to become the ultimate ruler of the planet, you need more than just cyborg agents. You need money. The game starts off with a small budget and a very basic set of weapons and additional equipment, which you can use to suit-up your men for the first set of missions. Additional money comes from taxes, which you can collect from every conquered area. This inevitably means: more land you conquer, more money you’ll get! “Syndicate” allows you to adjust the tax rate for each area, introducing a slight element of economy. Be careful though: in some cases it’s quite easy to make the inhabitants unhappy. If they are in a rebellious state, you might have to complete the mission for the given country once more.

Once you conquer some land and earn your first hundred thousands of credits, you might start thinking about investing money into research. In “Syndicate” you’ll have to spare some of your budget for development of new weapons and cyborg implants: invaluable factors on your road to victory. Starting from a plain UZI and flame throwers, you’ll develop all different sorts of high-tech armaments, such as time bombs, lasers, mini-guns and portable rocket launchers. Each type of weapon has different practical application, which you will have to discover during the course of the game. Yet, in order to be able to survive, you’ll need more than just firepower. You’ll need a strong army. To ensure this, you will research cybernetic implants for your cyborgs. These have been divided into 5 different parts: eyes, torso, arms, heart, legs and brain. Each implant gives the cyborg new abilities: Better eyes increase accuracy when shooting. Torso is a natural body armor, which improves healing (and on higher levers supplies each agent with a deadly auto-destruct explosive). Arms let your cyborg carry more weaponry, legs make him move faster, while heart prolongs the effects of all types of drugs, that you might inject into him during the game. Finally, the brain increases the “persuasion” skills of each cyborg. Why would we want to do that? Most important reason: to obtain more cyborgs. While you start the game with four primary units and 4 “spare” ones, you are not able to produce more of them on your own. What this means is that if you lose all of them, you’ll lose the game. To increase the number of your spare units, you will have to capture the enemy cyborgs using a “Persuadotron device”. However, cyborgs are highly resistant to persuasion, so in order to do this you will have to capture several civilian units before you can actually “persuade” a cyborg. Better the brain, less civilians you need.

Most missions will take place in the dark cities of the future. People walking around, cars driving on the streets, policemen patrolling the alleys. What you see is a regular day in a busy aglomeration, which adds to the realism of the game. If you pull out your guns in the public, you’ll raise panic among the civilians and the whole police will be right after you. Staying undetected makes the gameplay more difficult, but fun nonetheless (especially if you carry quite a military arsenal under your trench coat). Obviously, things turn out differently when you encounter enemy syndicate cyborgs. Usually their numbers are several times larger than yours (you can use at most 4 cyborgs in a mission), which makes the battle even more exciting. And it truly IS exciting, especially due to high quality of the sounds: gunshots, explosions, screams of people being burned by the flamethrower: it’s a war spelled with a capital W. Enemies will carry different assortment of weaponry (though will never outgun you technologically) and in extreme situations will just try to get close to you and self-destruct (which results in complete annihilation of the nearest area). To aid you in the battle, each cyborg is equipped with 3 sets of drugs, which you can activate by clicking on one of the three bars under each unit’s profile. These drugs influence adrenaline (red), perception (blue) and intelligence (gray) accordingly. The purpose of adrenaline is to increase movement speed of your cyborg. Perception influences the accuracy of shots, while intelligence determines how fast the cyborg will react on its own when the enemy is near. Drugs eventually wear out after a while, a process which you can prolong by investing in better heart implants. To make use of all these features easier, there’s a “panic mode” available (activated by clicking with both mouse buttons at once), which maxes out all drug dosages and puts the entire team on high alert. This is when the real havoc is being wrecked!

“Syndicate” is a nice mixture of strategy, action and economics, with a sweet dosage of murderous bloodshed (like one of these times when your killing spree tells you to exterminate entire population of the city). However the greatest thing about it is the air of dark-woven future throughout the entire game. In addition to sounds and a rather creepy ambient music, there was this unique living factor I mentioned earlier. For a game released in 1994 it was really awesome to see a living town (which you can devastate to some extent by burning the plants, blowing up vehicles and breaking the windows). Also, the way main menu was constructed added something to the impression of living in the future: semi-holographic images of the cyborgs, the world map and many other things, which were but a small detail, yet very important to the overall impression. “Syndicate” is definitely a game one could recommend to all fans of action-strategy games.
 

Sound – 8/10 – Sound was, to put it the easy way, awesome. The gunfights were really realistic and exciting. However, apart from this (plus the music and occasional scanner beeps) there was NO sound in the game. No car engines humming, no people talking… nothing!

Graphics -9/10 – Entire game was drawn in a nice high-resolution, keeping a high attention to the detail. You actually felt the “futureness” of the cities.

Overall - 8/10 – While exciting and fun to play, the entire game had one very annoying disadvantage: When your cyborg agents went behind the building, there was NO way to see what was going on (except seeing their numerical markers on the screen). Same rule applied when they entered a building, which made in-door gunfights really frustrating.