Syndicate: EA offers up fascism for free!

Here's the setup....

You're a CEO but not just any CEO.  Instead of cheesy photo ops and pandering to shareholders you command entire nations with an iron fist and a small army of deadly cyborgs.  It's a world born out of an Ayn Rand wet dream where brutal corporate fascism is considered "marketing."

Sound like fun?

It was back in 1993 and EA thinks it could be again.  To that end the latest "On the House" promotion for this quarter is the classic BullFrog game, Syndicate.

To play Syndicate is akin to playing the old board game Risk except but with small teams of Terminator-like cyborgs doing your dirty work.  You win by conquering other nations via missions that range from simple espionage to outright assassination.  Success brings great rewards with failure exacting an equal punishment. 

The game is considered a "Real Time Tactical Shooter"

Which in English means you direct a team of 4 cyborgs around a 2D map and directly control their actions while making sure you meet the mission's objectives.

The game's interface isn't very intuitive and has a bit of a learning curve but then most games of that era suffered the same affliction.  Remember, these were the days when DOS ruled the PC and a mouse was something that you set traps for unless you were a Mac user.

The graphics were astonishingly good for their time with this game being one of the first to utilize higher resolutions for actual gameplay (640x480) than was experienced in the menus.  Quite a feat considering most games of the time offered no better resolution than 320x200.

About a year or so ago I actually did a video series on classic PC games and dragged out my copy of Syndicate for one of them.  If you're on the fence over whether you want to sacrifice 60MB of storage space to try the game out I invite you to check out the video below. 

The game is currently free (normally $4.99) from EA's Origin service and comes with a preconfigured DOSBox shell for use on modern operating systems.