Caltrops - Article Submissions - Re: Syndicate Wars

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by Bitter 07/30/2004, 3:38pm PDT

curst wrote:

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.

The mission pack missions are way harder than the game -- a lot of them are on the level of the last mission of Syndicate itself. BTW, tip for beating that mission with not much difficulty: *lasers*. Usually too gay and costly throughout the game, lasers are instant vaporization devices. However, remember that you can't go super juice on your guys -- turn most of those adrenalin thingums down and just turn the smarts up so that they don't all shoot the game guy a dozen times as he vaporizes (you'll need all that ammo). You need a couple of Gauss guns for the dudes in the tower, and a few airstikes are good for blowing guys up without vaporizing them if you need miniguns for a few stragglers.

Now, the last mission of the American Revolutions (whatever) expansion is *you* playing the last mission in Syndicate from the opposite role -- your four dudes (a couple in towers so that they can't move for jack), versus an onrushing horde of agents. The rule there is airstrike, then airstrike, then airstrike, then maybe a few more airstrikes, then follow it up with lasers, then maybe an airstrike for dessert.

Maybe I need to really try Syndicate Wars again. I remember zapping a metal spider as really cool, but I seem to remember I had a really rough time at the end getting the super zappy laser thing against those final few nigh-invincible priest guys. The destruction stuff was very satisfying, though. I remember having some trouble with the integrated sprite/3D approach -- bridges or something that kept occluding my view (though Syndicate is worse with it's buildings, obviously). Also, I think the first Syndicate presented the grim industrial atmosphere in a more believable and grimy way. I could truly imagine a world controlled by cyborgs just blasting police down in crosswalks with miniguns and exploding maglev trains and performing hits.

And what I mean by "really good now" was a re-implementation of the basic concenpt, but with modern technology -- although you're right, I want to play it again (now). I want the volumetric lighting from the tongue of flame sent out by a minigun casting the monstrous shadows of my cybernetic thugs against the grimy wall of an industrial back alley. I want gysers of fluids and the mangled wreckage of what used to be a hovering bus full of babies, an unfortunate consequence of standing in the way of my grinding a cent off the cost of the drugs I sell to their soulless automaton parents.

And that's another cool thing about Syndicate -- the fact that the whole future is a lie altered by the presence of those chips. The whole intro to the second game is coming back to me.

And I want a new Twinsen game while I'm at it, goddamn it. Not too likely -- whatever happened to Adeline, anyway? Or the guys supposed to be making Outcast2?

Bitter.