Boy, the original SiN chose a poor time to come out. I know they couldn’t have predicted it beforehand, but 1998 was a titanic year for gaming. Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, even the original Pokémon games came out in the west that year. Then SiN made things worse by releasing an FPS on the 10th November. Nine days before Half-Life was released, which ended up setting a benchmark for shooters that continues on to this day. In comparison, poor old SiN was left to flounder in the background. I’d personally never heard of it. So maybe it was good of Nightdive to bring about SiN Reloaded and give it another chance. At least they didn’t do it on November 10th again.
Still, even remastered, SiN feels like an odd duck. It’s a product of its time, in many ways. Some things from that time era have aged well, and some definitely have not. Nightdive seem to have preserved the lot, which is probably the right way of doing things. There are lessons to learn from the past and I will applaud any attempt to preserve gaming past. If backwards compatibility is going in the bin, then remasters will have to patch the gaps. As for SiN itself, I’m a little torn. I did enjoy myself, but it felt like a lot of things were getting under my feet.
Remastered DNA
SiN Reloaded tells the story of Colonel John Blade – look this review will go down quicker if you stop pausing to roll your eyes. He’s helped by JC, a tech specialist with a haircut that looks like he’s been hit on the head with a chopping board. Blade is the head of a security company and, at least initially, he’s called in to help deal with a bank robbery. As you might expect, this quickly goes sideways. Blade chases the bank robbers and it quickly becomes apparent that they’re working for someone else. That ‘someone else’ turns out to be Elexis Sinclaire, the head of SinTEK, who wants to turn everyone into giant mutants. Blade responds in the accepted fashion: by firing lots of bullets at her henchmen.
The plot itself is fairly standard for the time. It gives a single overarching objective – stop Sinclaire – then just pulls it away from you on a string. Still, I don’t mind that too much because it takes us to a nice variety of locations. We start off busting our way through a bank, and while we do hit the sewers a few too many times, the other locations are more interesting. There are nuclear missile silos, weird underground labs, extensive underwater levels and an honest-to-goodness mansion. There’s even a jungle full of bananas – and mutants – at one point. While the remastered graphics weren’t blowing me away, SiN‘s commitment to doing new things kept each level fresh.
The levels are also pretty damn expansive, full of little secrets all over the place. I know for a fact that there were many more secrets than I found, as I kept coming across locked doors. Though given how expansive things were, I do wish they’d have given us a map. I got lost more than once. Still, gameplay in general isn’t too bad. It’s standard 90s FPS fare, with the nice addition of dual wielded pistols. The guns feel decent enough to use, with some high and low points. The shotgun and minigun were nice. The energy weapons felt like I was just spitting at the enemy. Still, gibbing enemies with the shotgun was immensely satisfying
Sinful Enemies
I do have some beef with SiN Reloaded though, and a lot of it centres around the enemies. For one thing, in a story about mutants, they could stand to be a bit more interesting. The influence of Quake II seems to extend beyond just sharing the engine. Every standard enemy, for ninety percent of the game, is just a cyborg. The more cyborg they look, the bigger weapon they wield. It’s just a bit boring. Secondly, the AI itself is a bit… weird. They have trouble with corners, for one, frequently firing into them. They also run repeatedly in circles at times. Maybe they’re panicking. That might also explain their struggle with doors.
It also goes to explain why the difficulty level is all over the place. I’m not sure whether there’s some of aim calculation going on in the background, but I was frequently met with enemies firing at me at point blank range and doing no damage. Maybe my armour was negating it, but it was just silly. I could’ve gone round with just my fists and not died at all. Half the enemies dropping healing items didn’t help. Then at the end there are a couple of enemies that can completely carve your health up in seconds. Culminating in a final boss that I beat without losing a single health point. This difficulty curve is more like a difficulty roller-coaster.
Also, and I appreciate this is an even more subjective point than the rest, a lot of SiN has not aged well. I’m not just talking about the haircuts, either. A lot of the banter between JC and Blade comprises of excruciating quips and pop-culture references. Half of Blade’s lines are just variations on threatening to beat up JC. It gets old. Then there’s the fact that SiN is relentlessly horny, to the point that it gets a bit much at times. I don’t know if the Quake II engine could do jiggle physics, but Elexis Sinclaire proves that we certainly can now. The biggest tell comes right at the start, where a random document has a straight up frame from a porn film. Says it all really. The 90s were a wild time.
SiN Reloaded – Worth Preserving?
Still, in the Roman emperor thumbs up or thumbs down test, I’d give SiN Reloaded a thumbs up. I think that mainly comes from the inherent silliness of the gameplay. Not the dialogue, which tries far too hard to be silly, but the abrupt chaos inherent in the missions. The turning moment for me came during a stealth mission early on. After hearing stealth I was expecting a chain of constant reloads and frustration. Instead, I walked through the door, a woman spotted me and I punched her, instantly dropping her. Then I punched the camera operator in the back of the head and got congratulated for it.
After that, I’d stop civilians from pulling the alarm by standing in the doorway and landing haymakers on them when they came close. It was hilarious, and far from the only moment that created a chuckle. Even unintentional stuff, like the vehicle physics bugging out like crazy, was good for a laugh. SiN doesn’t take itself seriously at all, which probably explains why it slipped through the net. It doesn’t hold itself to a coherent enough standard to become great. Even the Reloaded version is probably destined to be mid-range, but I had a good laugh and enjoyed my time with it. Can’t say fairer than that, really.
