R-Comp have now completed their conversion of Bullfrog's PC and Amiga classic, Syndicate. This is R-Comp's fourth conversion to be announced, following Doom, Quake and Abuse. Syndicate is a strategy game which puts you in control of a bunch of secret agents who must be moved throughout various enemy bases to fulfil their mission's objectives. The agents have a wide range of weaponry and other surveillance equipment at their disposal and can also pick up items left behind by their deceased enemies.

Cick on the screenshot to see the full picture...

An explosion	Smokin'!
A Burning Bush	'Carmagedden'
Burning people	Bang!

The preview version which was sent to Acorn Arcade features only a single level and no desktop front-end but was still fun to play. The demo runs in a 640 by 480 screen mode with 16 colours but the game only uses 640 by 400 because of the black strips running across the top and bottom of the playing area. Syndicate will run on any Risc PC/A7000 and R-Comp tell me that it can achieve up to 100 frames per second when running on a Strong ARM processor! The preview runs very smoothly on my ARM710 Risc PC so there shouldn't be speed problems on any of the RiscPC series and perhaps an A5000 version will be released using a cut down screen size. However, the full release version will require 8Mb RAM so unless your A5000 is packed with chips, you probably won't be playing Syndicate just yet.

As with the majority of R-Comp's games, only MIDI music playback is supported in the game. This means that unless you have a MIDI card fitted, there'll be no music. However, if the music for the game in a tracker format can be tracked down(!), that may be included before the final release. The sound effects will play without MIDI support though so it's not all that bad.

As with Doom and Quake, R-Comp's release version of Syndicate will include the original levels and the extra American Revolt missions on CD. Acorn Arcade think that R-Comp's strategy of including extra mission/level packs free with games is a very good thing and should be seriously considered by other games producers.