Syndicate

As part of their new range of ports of classic PC games from the past few years, R-Comp Interactive now have Bullfrog's mission-based action and strategy game, Syndicate, ready for imminent release. This joins their PC 3D-crowd of Doom, Quake and another soon-to-be-announced 3D game that like all of these was also popular enough to spawn a sequel.

Syndicate is a little like an isometric version of Cannon Fodder, only with much greater depth and more variety. The Acorn version runs in a 16-colour mode at a resolution of 640 by 400 on all Risc PCs, A7000s or A5000s with at least 8Mb of RAM (although R-Comp's publicity states 640x480, the top and bottom 40 pixels of the screen are solid black bars). The advertised graphical improvement over the PC version is that the 16-colour palette is chosen using 24-bit colour as opposed to a fixed 8-bit palette. Music is currently provided via MIDI, so you won't hear any unless you've got a suitable synthesiser, but all the sound effects and speech work fine without. The game is supplied on CD with both the original and supplemental missions, so there's potentially plenty to keep you entertained.

The game runs smoothly on my Risc PC 700, from which I've taken the following screenshots, reduced to fit on this page. Full-size versions are also available.

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