Syndicate retrospective – Why I thought: ‘This is rubbish!’

Posted February 21, 2012 by Julian Benson in News, Opinion.

Delayed Reaction: Welcome to a new regular in which one of our writers plays a classic with modern eyes. SYNDICATE sees a flashy FPS reboot this month, so we’ve taken the opportunity to look back at the isometric strategy game that defined a generation. But it wasn’t all plain sailing…

An hour in to Syndicate I was pretty sure I’d picked the wrong game to kick this column off with. It’s meant to be a classic right? I mean, I’ve only ever heard it spoken of with awe. Certainly, before the reboot was announced, the game had found its way into a number of ‘most like to see remade’ lists. But playing it I was thinking, “This is rubbish!”

I’ll get to the story and setting later, but the basic premise is that you command a team of four corporate enforcers on missions in a near-future world. You might be assassinating a rival corporation’s agents, kidnapping one of their scientists, or a mixture of the two. The whole thing is viewed from a fixed isometric viewpoint and controlled with the left and right mouse button.

I imagined tight structured missions where I’d equip each of my men for a specific purpose: a sniper to cover the others from a nearby rooftop; a heavy hanging back with a spooled-up minigun, ready to cut to shribbons anyone who looked at them funny; and a couple of all-purpose assault troops: I’d surmount the odds with tactics and gall. Except it was a whole lot easier just to equip all my men with Uzis and walk around the level in a group shooting anything that moved.

There are whole strings of annoyances that prevent you from playing tactically: if your team are equipped with different weapons then they won’t all shoot at the same time; your men don’t look after themselves if left to their own devices, they’ll stand there taking damage while you’re off dealing with something else; their pathfinding is awful – ordering them to walk across the level tends to leave them separated and slaughtered because they’d get themselves stuck on different bits of scenery.

While the game is playable, you have to spend all your time micromanaging the simplest of actions. Then there’s the massive oversight that if your squad goes inside a building (where there are often objectives) you don’t get a cutaway view of the interior. You have to guide them around inside using the minimap, and praying there isn’t anyone in there with a gun.

Change of heart

I was all set to give up on the game (and I’m still not a huge fan of it) but then I saw something that cracked a light on why it’s so liked. See, there’s an item in Syndicate that’s integral to some levels but also to the setting: the Persuadatron.

In this future world, everyone has CHIPs implanted into their brains that alter the users’ perception. A CHIP implantee can look in the mirror and see themselves as handsome. On grim days, they see only good weather; the CHIP hides the dismal world from them. The CHIP also allows the Syndicates to control the populace.

Using the Persuadatron, your team can hack someones CHIP. They become a mindless zombie that follows you everywhere. When I first used this on someone I didn’t see the point. They just got mown down as soon as a firefight began. But then one picked up a gun. They all picked up guns. I’d converted a little army. I was turning ordinary civilians into soldiers against their will, against their society, against their government.

I didn’t care if they died, and they died so easily, but they died for me. Not someone who’d been good to them but someone who happened to have the technology to capture them.

The moral bleakness of the thing started to hit home.

It’s not that the developers bash you over the head with it, it just clicks. As soon as people start enhancing their minds with technology, obscuring their view of the world, their lives become worthless. As they no longer perceived the world, were no longer actively part of it, so I felt no qualms about using civilians as a meat-shield.

Then I started to think about other games that came out in 1993. In particular XCOM and Cannon Fodder. The three games share a number of similarities. XCOM places you in command of an organisation that aims to take control of the globe too. It drives you to view the population without humanity and compassion. You sacrifice cities in an effort to protect whole states.

Behind the very colourful shooter, Cannon Fodder is something of a bloody reality. You kill hundreds of enemies in that game, leaving them in a mulchy pile on the ground (much like in XCOM and Syndicate). And when a member of your own team dies they’re quickly replaced by someone identical.

The same was the case in Syndicate: I had no attachment to my men. They were only worth the money I’d spent on upgrading them. At least in XCOM there was some humanity in the attachment you grew for your squad. In Syndicate they were all identical pawns.

Of the three I find Syndicate the least fun to play, but it’s not difficult to see the part it plays in gaming’s history. It attempted to present a living open city with its own population, transport system, and police force long before games like Grand Theft Auto came along. It, like many games afterwards, was heavily inspired by the Blade Runner (and Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep, the book the film’s based on). And, as an inspiration, it must have been in mind when the designers of Deus Ex sat down together – both visually and thematically, those games share a heritage.

You can pick up a copy of Syndicate at GOG, but I’m hesitant to recommend it.

Delayed Reaction sees BeefJack take a look back at an older game from a fresh perspective. This is the first one, but in the future you can click to read more of these weekly columns.

Tagged as Bullfrog, Cannon Fodder, Commandos, Delayed Reaction, Syndicate, XCOM