Retro Revival, Part #29 - Syndicate (2012, GOG.COM)
14Like a lot of major titles from the early 90s, my strongest memories of Bullfrog's tactical isometric action game Syndicate come from the experience of checking out the Amiga 500 version at a friend's house. The difference in audiovisual horsepower between the glorious Amiga (still by far the coolest computer ever in my opinion) and the paltry IBM PCs of the day felt a bit like the massive gulf between currentgen consoles and high-end PCs today, and for most games it was the sheer technical wizardry that left the deepest impression during those comparatively brief play sessions.
Not so with Syndicate. While Bullfrog's action/strategy hybrid has its fair share of high resolution maps and nice pre-rendered cutscenes, the game's miniscule isometric graphics weren't especially impressive even in 1993. Instead, it's something else that has stuck in my mind over all those years - namely the game's unrelenting *coldness*. Unlike certain more recent games involving criminal activities in urban environments, there's no attempt to offer a compelling narrative of redemption or even some rudimentary moral justification for all the organized violence. Instead, Bullfrog's consistent, decidedly unglamorous cyberpunk universe is an unremittingly dark and cynical world of sci-fi capitalism - defined as a ruthless zero-sum game in which the successfulness of a business operation is determined primarily by the sheer aggression of its daring hostile takeovers. Unlike the structurally somewhat similar X-COM, the gameplay in Syndicate - slow-paced as it is with abysmal path-finding - may not exactly have stood the test of time, but there will always be a place (in the darkest recesses of) my heart for Bullfrog's chilling commentary on the (post-)modern world economy. And oh, the new FPS reboot from Starbreeze looks alright, I guess..