Syndicate Wars
Two operatives Okay, so this isn't the earliest game review that ever came out, seeing how the game has been in the office for over six months now, but I am a very lazy person, and it is much more fun to play than to review. But the time has come to put aside childish things, pick up the pen, which is far mightier than the minigun, and begin. I played a bit of the old Syndicate years ago, and quite liked it, though I thought the actual game play was less fun than the planning and the research, and all that global domination stuff, which reminds me now of Command & Conquer.

Then along came Syndicate Wars, just like the old game, only better. The first thing I noticed was the new interface. It's lovely, I mean really really nice. It's like you've always wanted a computer interface to be, complete with nice noises, friendly voice and good graphics. Navigation around to the various parts of your virtual terminal isn't that easy, but then that's probably because I'm too lazy to read the manual and so I'm forced to do everything by trial and error.

The actual gaming is pretty good too, very similar to the old Syndicate, but sufficiently improved to keep me playing for longer. The missions start very easy, almost too easy, if it weren't for the fact that, being too lazy to read the manual, I had no idea how to do even the simplest things; so pathetically easy was the right level for me. After that, things get a lot more difficult, so that eventually I was forced to actually do the necessary reading to find out how to do things like look through buildings and spin my little world around.

A nasty business, religion But of course, the main reason anyone plays Syndicate Wars is for the utterly comic book violence. And as miles over the top aggro goes, it's among the best. The guns make fantastic noises, the screaming of panicked civilians is just how I imagine it would be and there's absolutely no penalty for shooting everyone in sight. All right, that's not entirely true, if your mission is to kidnap someone, you can't very well count it a success if your intended capture is lying in a pool of his or her own blood among a pile of other corpses. But it's fun though.

There's a lot to like about this game. I love the voice that tells you what kind of gun your operatives have selected, and the graphics on Hi-Res mode provide enough detail for you to be able to get right in among your guys as they blast their way to freedom, or whatever. The story of a world gone mad is also a pretty good one, and the choice of sides - between an evil repressive regime and a cult run by nine insane leaders hell bent on total global destruction is perfectly in keeping with the depressing nature of the background scenario. If you want more info on the storyline, check out the web page. It lives at http://www.bullfrog.co.uk:80/games/syndicate-wars/, so go and have a look, but watch out for stray bullets.

Reviewed by Ben Eveling