Shameful use of a successful franchise name to market a game which has nothing to do with it.

User Rating: 1 | Syndicate PC
I played the original Syndicate a lot back in the day. And those were the days, when with each new game release you expected not another clone of something the market is already over-saturated with, but instead something new and smart and cool.

Syndicate was new, smart and cool - its then unique blend of strategy and action made it a game to withstand time in the all-time best lists of a lot of people.

When its sequel Syndicate Wars was released a few years after the original, I was unsure what to expect. But I didn't expect a watered down mass-media and mainstream-catering action schlock sequel, because back in the nineties and as far as the computer game market is concerned, they hadn't become a fashion yet. I wasn't disappointed with it - it was slightly worse and slightly better than the original in varying aspects, but overall was another tremendously enjoyable game.

Then the years passed, and the mediocrity installed itself progressively in the computer game industry as more and more talented developers either retired or took off to pursue different lives, or were acquired by bigger and bigger companies who started to impose more and more of their own rules, taking away the liberty and creativity from the game development process.

By the time I've heard about this 2012 remake, I've taken the news with a pinch of salt, because by this time I had already been disappointed far too many times by known game franchise names being ruined by petty corporate executives and their exclusively money-based world.

Even that, however, couldn't prepare me to behold what they've done with this game. It's no longer a strategy game, be it an action strategy game or otherwise, and it's no longer anything much to do with the previous Syndicate games, aside from the title. And it's not even a good game, regardless of if you tie it with the (dead and buried) franchise or not.

I pity the original Syndicate. I pity Peter Molyneux. But above all, I pity any fan of the original who got conned into buying this because of the title, just as I pity any enthusiast of new, smart and cool games, because there isn't none here. Move along, move along.