Bullfrog’s Syndicate Wars is one of my fondest teen gaming memories. Its release in 1996 coincided with my increasingly amount of disposable income and my newfound habit of buying monthly gaming mags (why, here’s TV’s Charlie Brooker reviewing Syndicate Wars for PC Zone). At the time it was visually impressive – true 3D (except for squishy humans and other small objects who remained stuck in spriteland) with full rotational camera – and the grotty cyberpunk setting’s casual, callous violence sucked me right in.
It’s also a cruel game at times, with the odds stacked against you from relatively early on, but perseverance has its own rewards. Blow up a bank with a nuclear grenade and loot the proceeds? Awesome fun. Vaporise enemies with the plasma lance? Awesome fun. Hop into a hovercar and rain minigun fire down from above? Awesome fun.
Unfortunately the game’s final level was exceptionally hard, even when compared to its predecessor’s Atlantic Accelerator finale (in which you’re outnumbered by about 10 to 1 and under fire within the first few seconds of the mission). Rather than throwing a huge army at you right away, Swars placed one of your four agents in each of the corners of the map, backed up by a few drone agents with slightly weaker weapons. From the outset it was a constant juggle, hopping between each of your teams and trying to keep them alive and chip away at the enemy forces. You needed all four agents, you see, and losing one of them meant mission failed.
What was really, really nasty, though, was that this was part one of a three part mission. In part one you needed to battle your way to the bottom of a space elevator. In part two, if you made it that far, your team of four agents – reunited – was aboard a space station. Its corridors were fragile and a single stray shot destroyed the station, which meant mission failed and back to the start.
Back to the start of part one.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-
I confess, I made it to the space station a number of times (after an hour’s painstaking progress on each attempt), and on every occasion an enemy unit immediately rushed at my team, opened fire and blew the station. What the hell I was supposed to do was beyond me at age 14. I’m not sure now. Did Syndicate Wars have cloaking devices? Whatever: I never even saw part three, which was apparently set on the moon.
So the question of the week is: did any of you actually beat this goddamn level? If so, how did you do it? If not, was it because we sucked or did Bullfrog just take pleasure in crushing the dreams of shooty cyberpunk ultraviolence fans?
Comments
7 responses to “QOTW: F*ck Your Space Elevator”
I remember the first Syndicate’s final level being absurdly difficult. The only way to beat it was to fill the equipment slots with lasers and a force-field and send your team out one at a time to vaporise enemy agents till they ran out of lasers and got killed themselves.
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.
Jonathan M posted: "I remember the first Syndicate's final level being absurdly difficult. The only way to beat it was to fill the equipment slots with lasers and a force-field and send your team out one at a time to vaporise enemy agents till they ran out of lasers and got killed themselves."
This appeared on another post for some reason (IntenseDebate I suspect).
This was the same strategy I used for the Accelerator – although one enemy agent was stuck in a building so I had to send in my own agents one at a time and suicide them in the hopes of blowing up that one last agent. Managed it with one friendly agent remaining!
This game crushed me, my spirits and my patience through and through. At 11 or 12 years old my grasp of the game and what was required of me to be at all successful was painfully limited. I don't think I ever made it past the 2nd or 3rd level and even passing those involved tediously long stretches. I was still at the age where turning the corner in Doom 2 and facing a Spider Mastermind caused panic attacks and cowardly bouts of fleeing.
For some reason though Syndicate Wars still holds a sentimental spot in my gaming heart, even after all the frustration.
This sounds like my teenage attempts to play the Panzer General games on the urging of more historically-minded friends…
Never played it, but the article and comments make me wish I had. It feels like a past thing I've missed rather than a future thing I have control over.
It had a terrible multiplayer. It was dead within a month of release though, so unless a group of hardcore players have latched onto it, you'd be lucky to get any action on it now.
Swars was enough of a nightmare when I understood the briefings – must've been extra tough without! Such great fun though, which is why I always came back to it…