Caltrops - Article Submissions - Re: Syndicate Wars

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by curst 07/29/2004, 9:44am PDT

Bitter wrote:

Not as good as Syndicate, especially the awesome mission pack.

I DISAGREE. Syndicate was damn fun for a long time, but the final mission's ridiculous difficulty basically made me quit. A friend of mine bought the mission pack and said that the expansion pack did nothing to alleviate the difficulty, so I never bothered.

Meanwhile, I had a great time with Syndicate Wars.

The one thing that I think sucked about it: I liked the feeling you got that you were running a corporation that in turn was taking over the world. As you bumped off rival syndicates' agents and your influence spread, your profits increased, leading to more advanced technologies. In Syndicate Wars, you get money by destroying banks, carjacking armored vehicles, or brainwashing civilians (some of whom were a little richer than others). Yes, this is a stupid intangible thing, but with Syndicate you actually felt like you were running a ruthless corporation that was willing to resort to slaughtering civilians if they got in the way of rising profits, rather than a desperate terrorist organization doing whatever it could just to stay alive. You were a cross between Gordon Gekko and Charles Joseph Whitman.

Wait, there's one more problem, and it ties into the difficulty. For the most part, SWar's difficulty scales better. That is to say, I don't remember disliking the original game's difficulty until the very final level. It's easy, easy, easy, easy, easy, easy, easy, easy, easy, easy, sorta tough, sorta tough, sorta tough, YOU ARE INSTANTLY DEAD (reload) YOU ARE INSTANTLY DEAD (reload) YOU ARE INSTANTLY DEAD (quit). In Syndicate Wars it gradually ramps up, but never gets totally out of hand. However, this only holds true if you got the money and scientists required to research the most powerful technologies. It is damn hard to pull this off. To try to draw a comparison, imagine if you had only a slight chance of beating Final Fantasy 10 without finding all the ultimate weapons for each character. I imagine it'd be possible to win SWars with decent technology, but the final several levels would probably be an absolute bitch to win.

I'll freely admit that I exploted the game in an obvious way - before you deploy your agents, you can purchase information that'll lead to bonus stuff - "this building is a bank", "scientists spotted in this area". This bonus stuff is always the same, so feel free to save your game, go to a mission briefing, purchase the extra information, then reload the saved game and do the mission without having to pay for the information.

Aside from that, SWars was pure love. There's a Populous-like undeniable sense of fun watching hundreds of brainwashed civilians marching behind you, serving as third-rate party characters/human shields. The settings are not terribly diverse, but the mission objectives are, so very few levels feel the same as others.

And the destruction - HOLY SHIT. To this day I'm not sure there are any games that give you such a wonderful sense of absolutely motherfucking levelling a major metropolis. Some of the skyscrapers have maybe fifty floors on them. Plant a bomb at the base. Run away a little bit. Watch that motherfucker collapse exploding floor by exploding floor, debris flying fucking everywhere with every indvidual floor. Call in air strikes and watch a trail of what look like mini-nukes levelling entire city blocks. Get the most powerful laser cannon, fully charge it up, and watch the main beam completely eviscerate a police car in what would be a gratifying-enough explosion by itself, and then watch the "leftover" energy trails fly around and take down a few nearby hovertaxis and motorbikes, with civilians being splattered all the while. It's like an isometric GTA3, except with oh-so-beautifully explodable buildings.

Bet it could be pretty cool today. Like Full Spectrum Warrior, but, you know, fun.

I tried to play it on both Win98 and WinXP machines, only to watch it uncerimoniously crash to the desktop constantly at the same point. I want to say it's after I won a level and it tried to play the fireworks-celebration movie. Hopefully it's just my CD or some bizarre conflict on my PC that wouldn't affect others.

I miss my crowd of minigun-wielding prostitutes.

Those are businesswomen, thank you. Classy corporate ladies who were on the fast track to success and now have been brainwashed into gunning down police and (I imagine) sucking cock nonstop. Which makes Syndicate Wars all the better.