Syndicate - Bullfrog/Electronic Arts RRP œ44.99 (Strategy game for PC and Amiga) Reviewed on PC by Roy Sims 'Syndicate' is the latest release from Bullfrog, who have created a name for themselves over the last four years after the success of Populous, Powermonger and Populous II. For the first time, the PC version of one of their games has appeared simultaneously with the release of the Amiga version. In fact, the PC was the lead version. The game is set in the dark and twisted cities of tomorrow, where giant multinational corporations have literally taken over the world. They own small countries and have high levels of involvement in politics. Out of the takeovers emerged three giant mega-corporations, controlling the U.S, Europe and the Far East. The European corporation developed the CHIP, a device which could be plugged into someone's brain. Once there, it could make them believe they were happy and living in a beautiful environment when the truth would actually be the exact opposite! The CHIP gave them ultimate power to control the populations of the world, but the criminal Syndicates took advantage of the technology by pirating the device, and they eventually bought their way into the board rooms of the ruling corporations. Each of the 9 known Syndicates aims for world domination. Anyone considered a threat is simply wiped out by their hired team of cyborg assassins. It makes a change for the plot of a game to sound quite interesting, even if it has been influenced by Philip K. Dick and William Gibson in a BIG way. It does help to explain why citizens tend to do nothing when you are wading through and massacring enemy agents (although this is more likely to be an excuse so that the programmers didn't have to worry about programming some sort of a.i. routines for all the wandering citizens!). The gameplay is divided into three parts. On one hand you have to choose and equip your team of cyborgs, deciding who goes and how many (1-4) for each mission. Money should be regularly paid into research for better equipment, and cyborgs should also be upgraded every so often as the missions get harder. Upgrades include limb replacements that increase the strength of your assassins. The more money you put into modifications and research, the better your group will be in the long run. You can also inject drugs into each member that alter three attributes that come into play when the assassins are left to their own devices (when you are concentrating on just one instead of the entire group). The three attributes are Intelligence, Perception and Adrenalin. I suppose this is the cyberpunk equivalent to altering character attributes before you play in a role playing game. Anyway, after equipping your team, you go into the mission which is played out within an isometric display. This part of the game becomes a case of watching the scanner, killing the enemy and achieving the objective (which is to either persuade someone to join you, or to kill particular enemies or all of them!). The third part of the game is a version of the old 'Humarabi' resource management game where you must raise taxes to pay for your research and equipment. When a captured region decides it isn't happy under your regime, you must go back in there and sort them out. There are a number of problems with 'Syndicate' which are caused by poor game design. The isometric view itself gets in the way during combat. Often you get shot by people who you physically can't see because they are on the other side of the street and are obstructed by the angle employed. The same problem happens when you go inside buildings. Instead of switching the view to inside, the view stays outside and all you see are disembodied numbers floating around that represent each of your own cyborg agents. You have to frantically move the target cursor around until it turns red. This means that it has found a target and is within range for the weapon the agent is currently using. If you press both mouse buttons then your group goes into auto-pilot and attack on their own, but this isn't so good as you generally tend to lose at least two agents as a result each time! Another problem is that whilst it seems like a good idea to be able to split up your group of (up to four) assassins, they often get split up completely by accident! I lost count of the number of times that one or two of my group stumbled into a wall just a few pixels away from the other assassins and therefore tried to reach the destination via another (inappropriate) route. These are fundamental problems with the game design and whilst they don't cause too many problems in the early (easier) missions, later on they completely ruin the game! The other major problem with 'Syndicate' is that after a while the missions became very repetitive and the isometric graphics don't seem to change either. Considering that it takes up 11 and a half meg on my hard disk I would have thought some different backgrounds and buildings would have been included, especially when you consider that each mission is set in a different country (and therefore it isn't unreasonable to expect to see different climates and different architecture!). However, the quality of the graphics that are used is generally very high. It helps that the game runs in 640 x 400 VGA. The detail and clarity in this resolution is excellent and it makes me wonder why other companies haven't put this mode to greater use in the past. The intro sequence is very good, as it uses animated ray traced futuristic cars etc. It is let down a little by some poor animation of a man near the end but other than that it is impressive. Sequences of a similar style pop up when you succeed in a mission and when you fail, although they are always the same no matter which mission you have just done. The sound effects via Soundblaster are sparse but quite good, especially the shotguns and the screams of men set alight with a flamer (flame thrower). You get to hear "this is the police - throw down your weapons" when you are wandering around with your weapons drawn, which all adds to the atmosphere. To conclude, 'Syndicate' is quite playable at the start, but as the tougher missions come into play the flaws in the isometric view get in the way and ultimately ruin it. This is a great shame as the basic idea is a good one. I think Bullfrog were just too comfortable with the isometric style (after both Populous games and Powermonger) to try a different approach this time around. Having said all that, I know a few people who have found the game to be excellent and have gone on to complete all of the missions. Unfortunately, I found the game to be too much of a chore after the easy missions had been completed to go on. It just didn't feel or play like a PC strategy game should, especially when you have to fork out nearly œ45 for the privilege! NB: I also had a lot of trouble getting the game to run. The manual mentions creating a boot disk if you have memory problems, but it wasn't memory I was having problems with. If I followed the loading instructions the game would let me set up my team and then it would crash back to DOS. Under these circumstances, the game didn't even run the intro. I could run the intro but it would crash back to DOS at the end without even going into the game. What I eventually discovered was that you HAVE to create a simple boot disk exactly as stated in the manual else the game won't run at all, regardless of whether you have the required memory or not! Also, the game only runs with a real Soundblaster card. Even if your card is compatible with Soundblaster and works with everything else, it won't work with Syndicate. All this messing around to get the game up and running correctly is down to sloppy programming or a lack of understanding when it comes to the PC market. Let's hope they release a patch disk curing these annoying problems soon.