PS1 Review: Syndicate Wars (1997)

Syndicate Wars! Man, PS1 games can seem really old these days. That's because they are. They can also still rule.

I came into Syndicate Wars by way of the remake, Syndicate (2012), and all its dubstep-laden shooter madness. I skipped the PC originals because most of PC gaming still scares me, so I moved on to this PS1 edition of the RTS-RPG-shooter hybrid. You control up to four cybernetically-enhanced soldier man working for future Asian fusion corpo-nation-states and/or religious cults. Between corporate espionage missions (with optional side-missions, like blowing up banks), you upgrade your soldiers with cyber-enhancements and gunz. From what I can tell, this PS1 version involves a lot less resource and research management, so no wonder I was more drawn to it. I loved the ridiculous amount of chaos you can generate, and the bizarre strategic potential of hypnotizing dozen of ordinary businessladies and businessmans with the brilliantly-named "persuadertron" and arming them with mini-guns found on the ground so you can raid your enemies' fortresses. Sometimes you lose all of them in an accidental fire as you blow up police hovercars. The violent potential of the sandbox pretty much rules in Syndicate Wars. And it can get pretty hectic out there, so much so that on a few occasions I acquired too many characters on screen and crashed the game. Unfortunately, the PS1 controller is by no means capable of translating the complexities of control afforded by a keyboard and mouse to a d-pad, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons. You can get used to the awkward controls, but they're complex enough to be easily forgotten if you stop playing for more than a few days, and some of the more difficult parts of the game become even more difficult when you can't remember how to reassign weapons to your allies on the fly. Syndicate Wars can also be incredibly, frustratingly difficult at times, with often opague mission parameters that practically require you to fail before you can come to grips with them and what you actually need to do to progress. Specifically, the last mission is complete crap; you can only beat it, basically, by getting lucky, and more pointedly, losing a lot first. I beat it because I'm impossibly hard-headed when it comes to bullshit video games. I won't let them win. Syndicate Wars did not win, except in the sense that it's a lot of old (and old-fashioned) fun.