Syndicate

Syndicate is a cyberpunk tactical strategy game from Bullfrog Productions that arrived on the 3DO in 1995. The player runs one of the future's corporations, tasked with taking over the world map city by city. Into every mission go four cybernetically enhanced agents — and they aren't heroes, just tools that get simply replaced if lost. Between missions, controlled territories generate tax revenue, funding further expansion and turning the world map into a layer of the game in its own right.

Missions take place in isometric cities full of pedestrians, cars, and police, and usually offer more than one approach: a quiet infiltration, an open firefight, or a device that turns bystanders into your own units. Between actions, profits are spent in the main menu on researching new weapons and on cybernetic implants that boost an agent's speed, durability, and accuracy. The arsenal also includes drugs administered mid-battle that can calm an agent down or whip them into aggression — with the risk that they'll lose control. The game's tone is cold and cynical: civilians are just a statistic to be sacrificed without hesitation, and the story never pretends otherwise. It's exactly this ruthlessness that people remember Syndicate for.

Syndicate arrived on the 3DO at a time when consoles generally steered clear of strategy games this complex, making it one of the most demanding titles in the whole library. Visually it rests on a dark, rain-soaked city lit by neon, with music that bubbles and drones rather than plays a melody. At the time it was praised as one of the studio's best games and as a title that translated cyberpunk into playable form earlier than most others. Today it shows that controlling a squad of four agents is a bit rough and missions repeat after a while, but the atmosphere of a heartless corporate future has few rivals, and the game still reads well as a forerunner of today's tactical games, which likewise combine out-of-mission preparation with in-mission improvisation.