Dictionaries are great for finding out what words mean, but there's some crucial information they don't include: the vibe of a word. I don't know about you, but I find the word 'Syndicate' inherently menacing and ominous. I suspect that, for many people it's just a word. But anyone who has played the game of the same name will undoubtedly understand what I mean when I say that there are certain connotations for me now, and have been ever since I first encountered Syndicate.
I first read about this masterpiece of a game in PC Zone magazine in June 1993, when they ran a preview. Peter Molyneux did his usual 'talking up' of the concepts involved and, on this occasion, it seems the game that was delivered very much matched what he promised (I know, I can't believe it either). A complete review followed two issues later, earning a score of 90% and a tagline of "Incredibly violent, completely amoral and brilliant fun." I'm inclined to agree. (The moral of the story is that if you expect the truth from Mr Molyneux more than 2 months in advance of the release date, that's on you.)
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| Syndicate box art, from the SNES version. Source: Amazon. |
I can't remember the first time I played it, but it was almost definitely on a magazine demo disk or round a friend's house, and I do remember enjoying it. A lot. The high-res (albeit 16-colour, amazingly) graphics were jaw-dropping for the time but, most of all, it was the atmosphere that stayed with me - the futuristic, cyberpunk visuals and the music in particular. Probably the violence, too. I don't think it's a game I bought back in the day, but it's a game I always felt fondly of, partly because of the time (it was a golden era for those who enjoyed PC games) but partly, also, because it's cool. I'd never played a game before where you could get on a train and ride it to the next station, or where you could shoot a car and then kill the occupant who got out, or shoot flames at people and trees, setting them all on fire. In fact, it's only just occurred to me: Syndicate is GTA before GTA even existed. I think it might have been the most violent game 13-year-old me had seen up to that point other than Wolfenstein 3D.
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| Setting NPCs and trees on fire. All screenshots captured by the author, using DOSbox. |
I never bought it though. It was expensive at the time and I was buying cheap, older games from the market. I did pick it up, subsequently, when it was released for the PSP via the PlayStation store in the '00s but I don't think I ever actually got around to playing it. I bought it again about 10 years ago on the EA store when it was, er, free. But again, I didn't play it. Something about it kept me coming back to it though. The problem is that I hate strategy games. I like the idea of them; I just don't like playing them. Anything with a world map can fuck off, basically. I'm much more of a driving, jumping, shooting or flying kind of person: I played hours of F1GP, completed Knights of the Sky by becoming an Ace pilot, enjoyed fighting for the Rebel Alliance in X-Wing, collected points and power-ups in Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, and used big weapons to kill bad guys in Wolf 3D and Doom. But even Lemmings struggled to hold my attention. Over the years I have deliberately avoided any kind of strategy game: Dune, X-Com, Command & Conquer - no matter the reviews, no matter who recommended them. And I never really understood why until recently.
I decided to find out what I was missing and started a play-through of the original Dune. At first, I was really enjoying myself and wondered what I'd been making such a fuss about. The missions were manageable, I was winning, and it was all making sense. But then I reached a point. The things I had to keep track of were too much. I couldn't stay on top of the attacks and the amount of defence I had to do. I didn't know what to invest my money in because there were too many options and I didn't have the patience to work out what was the best... strategy, basically. The bottom line of it is that I got over-stimulated and, once that happens, I'm no longer having fun. This is why I consider Plants vs Zombies to be a strategy game (even though it's considered 'casual'), because there are too many decisions to be made, too many variables.
There is another factor. There are some games you can just jump right into and play, such as Doom. Provided you know the controls, you're never at a huge disadvantage. Some games, however, require some study of the manual. Syndicate is one of those games. If you don't know that you can only perform research on one thing at a time, it can be confusing. If you don't know there's a 'panic-mode' that makes it easier to deal with overwhelming situations, you'll die quickly. If you don't know about the intelligence, perception and adrenaline sliders, you're missing out on half the game, and if you don't know how the persuadertron works, you'll struggle.
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| Building an entourage with the persuadertron. |
These are all things I learned in September 2026 when I decided to sit down and play Syndicate properly for the first time. Often I prefer to play games on native hardware, but this often becomes a barrier to enjoyment. Given that I had a copy in the EA store ready to go, I thought "why not?". (Also, I was trying to complete X-Wing Alliance and that had become too difficult and annoying, so I needed to procrastinate.) I completed the first two levels perfectly adequately with minimal losses but, by the third level, all my agents were dead and I used up my 4 reserve agents on the retry. I didn't know how to recruit and it was this one question that made me realise that, rather than giving up, reading the manual might be necessary. Luckily an electronic version is provided with the game and, suddenly, all became clear. I thought I could just 'persuade' normal citizens and that they would be converted to my ranks, but no. I have to convert rival agents and, in order to do that, I have to first convert citizens, guards and police. Suddenly I could play the game and now I've taken over about a third of the planet. Winning.
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| The world map. You start in Europe and work your way across the globe. |
The difficulty curve appears quite steep to begin with, and there are some missions that just seem to be impossible. While it's true that's it's not one of those games where you can brute force it by trying the same strategy over and over again until, miraculously, it works one time, the difficulty is more linear than it seems. You do have to get good, however, and you have to do it quickly. You have to become evil in order to succeed in Syndicate, and that's easier for some than others. Maybe I've become more evil in the last 30 years and that's why I'm enjoying it more. Who knows? Either way, it's the first time I've managed to develop a hunger for world domination and it's very addictive.
If you're paying attention to all aspects of the game then progress is quite manageable. In terms of weapons, the pistol is useless pretty much from the get-go and the shotgun isn't much more use than that. The Uzi can be acquired fairly early on but is also useless in missions where you get inundated with rival agents. It just doesn't do enough damage quickly enough and also pushes your victims out of weapons range, making the whole process of killing them very frustrating. Getting hold of the flamethrower is a watershed moment, as it kills with one shot and doesn't use up its ammo too quickly. This is why managing the research aspect of the game is important. Theoretically, if you manage taxes and research skilfully, you'll be able to gain access to mods and weapons for your cybernetic agents in a timely fashion. The bottom line is, if a mission appears to be 'impossible', you probably haven't put enough time into this aspect of the game.
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| The team selection and upgrades screen. Available weapon upgrades are on the right. |
Although multiple missions are available after a territory is taken, it's not always a good idea to 'jump ahead'. Sweeping across Asia can be done relatively quickly, but if you try to infiltrate the Americas too soon, you'll find your entire squad has been insta-killed by a laser from an unknown opponent, and that's no fun (though I'd love to see the look on your fact when it happens). You might even waste time looking to be more tactical in your missions, finding a good spot to snipe from or waiting around a corner for the rival agents to filter through. All-out attack is usually the only way, however, mostly because the environments have been designed in such a way to make that the only option. You could spend two or more attempts at trying a more defensive strategy in a level before realising the landscape is completely open - no corners, no alleyways, no rooftops - no hiding, basically.
So this leaves you with two options: kill or persuade. If you have enough time, you could run around for 20 seconds or so persuading civilians, guards and police until, hopefully, by the time the enemy attacks, you'll be able to persuade them, too. This brings the added benefit of a 'human shield' reducing the chances of your own agents taking damage, and armed allies who will attack alongside you. If you don't have that crucial 20 seconds, you'll be thrown straight into the action, which means that burning everything (and everyone) to the ground may be your only option. Time is perhaps a bigger enemy than your opponents in Syndicate, and that's the joy(?) of real-time strategy. thinking is an essential part of success in this game and if you don't even get time to think, you're gonna be dead pretty quickly.
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| Recruiting rival agents is handy and, sometimes, a life saver. |
This brings me onto the fact that there are no difficulty levels in Syndicate. The only way to mitigate this is to save before each mission. While this doesn't affect the difficulty of gameplay (i.e. hard), it can help to decrease the chances of you rage-quitting early on. I don't know if many people completed Syndicate, but I suspect most that started either got very far or not very far at all.
Losing agents in battle is one of the main problems. Although your agents have names, it's not as easy to get attached to them as in, say, Cannon Fodder (released around the same time). So if they die, they die. But they do take all their upgraded body parts and weapons with them and that costs money. What you don't want is to end up in a 'shituation' where you don't have enough money for appropriate weapons for your next mission, and no way to conduct research for upgraded parts. This effectively soft-locks you in the game, making it impossible to progress, so I think some level of saving is essential. I ended up saving just before every new mission. If three or more of my agents died, I reloaded. A lot of the time you might start a mission and realise you are inadequately tooled-up, so a test run is often necessary.
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| Down to one agent. At least you can pick up your dead colleagues' upgrades. |
Having multiple missions available for completion at each stage is important. Doing the same level over and over (ironically, like X-Wing Alliance, the game I was avoiding in the first place) until you complete it gets old, but as long as there are other levels to procrastinate on in-game, you're less likely to want to quit.
While it is possible to gear up your 4 agents separately, I didn't encounter any missions where I did anything other than control my squad as a group. Maybe I'm missing something, but the idea of leaving one of my agents in one part of the map doing nothing while I'm off persuading a scientist seemed... counterproductive. 4 flamethrowers are better than 1. I have come across someone who can complete the whole game with only one agent, so I suppose that's an option.
One of the reasons I prefer to play on original hardware is that, if there's an issue, I'll know what to do. If the game crashes in an emulator (which it did, but only once) it's very hard to work out if it's the emulator or the PC. This can get annoying, especially if you're halfway through a level where you've persuaded 50 people and are escorting a hostage to the drop-zone and it's your 6th attempt at doing so.
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| Getting persuaded civilians to follow you can be a pain. |
There are a couple of annoyances. The AI is pretty jank at times and this manifests in various ways. Although you control your team with mouse clicks, be they on foot or in a vehicle, AI is in charge of working out how to get you from A to B. This doesn't always work out for the best if the destination is too far from the origin. Sometimes one of your squad will somehow get lost in a building, or they'll fall into the water, or off an elevated platform that they can't then get back up from. Sometimes the vehicle you're travelling in will go completely the wrong way (especially annoying if you've just completed a mission and need to evacuate and the AI leads you straight into enemy hands). Sometimes you need to guide a hostage to the pick up point and, where they walked perfectly fine before, they suddenly get stuck on every wall, fence and girder in sight. It's extremely annoying at times.
But the best thing about this game is the small details. For instance, when you <persuade> civilians, they start following you and, if they come across a weapon dropped by a slain opponent, they'll pick it up! Then when you start shooting, they join in. The names given to your recruits are also names of the dev team, and I noticed a few other notable names from gaming history used in the mission briefs. Also something as small as when you visit the save/load screen, your most recent save is the one that's selected so you don't accidentally load the wrong game. The UI and the general flow of the game is all very well designed.
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| Exploding things is fun. |
By the time I'd completed all the research and upgraded all of my squad to version 3 cybernetic mods, I had conquered half the world. This did make it a bit easier to complete subsequent missions, and perhaps I was saving too often, so I would actually enjoy playing again at some point but making it a bit harder. It's still possible to make silly mistakes, even when you're boss level, so it's never too easy. I hear that the DLC, American Revolt, is super tough, so maybe I'll try that. I can't find a legit digital version though.
So that's my overview of Syndicate. I watched a bunch of interviews after completing the game and the team that created it were in their early '20s when they wrote this game, which makes it all the more impressive. It's an incredible competently-produced game. If you haven't played it and you like strategy, it's still worth a look. Thanks to the prevalence of mobile and indie titles, it doesn't feel particularly dated in my opinion. It's very accessible, mouse-driven and loads of fun. The sound effects are legendary and the music, though limited, still manages not to be annoying despite the repetition. I think it's one of the earliest examples of adaptive music, that changes dynamically based on the action in the game. A sequel, Syndicate Wars followed 3 years later but I know nothing about that, so I don't know yet if I'll give it a go.
Thanks for reading!