This is a game I saw a review of on youtube randomly. I've seen it in one or two places and it's been loosely compared to syndicate. On the surface it actually looks vaguely like syndicate and seems syndicate inspired. it plays very different though and i have no idea what to compare it to.

This game is remarkably rare/obscure. Part of it's obscurity and failure to emerge later by retroarchaolgists could well be the title, which is quite difficult to find relevant results and fetter them out through a google search, but its more than that. the game has very little footprint anywhere, and simply cant be found for sale. Those that can find it such as myself are going to be dismayed by the stability and bugs it has. To top it all off the gameplay is fairly lackluster. I managed to get it from our good buddies over at russia who have had excellent taste in weird and cut rate gems. the game is rugged but certainly not reliable. It plays 100% russia style.

Getting it to work wasnt so tough. i got the full iso and ran a D3D patch in win 95 compatibility mode. This game suffers from a lot of the direct3d/directdraw errors that comes with playing newer games on windows 95/98/ I'm talking about the weird color artifacts in starcraft, red alert, and iirc diablo that occur when you alt tab then come back to it. However in this game they take a different nature, the game simply crashes on start up. Our russian friends tweaked the exe to rectify this into a hacky fix, however... that's only smooth on the surface.

the crash on startup was fixed (courtesy of vlad) The real trouble for me began when i tried to see mission objectives, and what do i find? that horrid unreadable pink text, lol. at this point all bets were off and traditional fixes to this problem would actually immmediately crash the game. (such as leaving the monitor properties open, or crtl alt deleting explorer and then attempting to start the game. a darn shame. i can't play this. and i wont.

The controls are wonky and its a strange mix of action game and point and click, to make things a bit more tedious is the way these aventure game style scenes will shift to the next scene when you walk to the edge. the camera angle will be randomly assigned in such a way that you are disoriented where you came from and where you are going. For a typical point and click game this is no problem, but a game where you are fleeing the cops and they are shooting at you as you are trying to go in a certain direction (i.e. 'away' from where you came) this is big trouble. the edges themselves arent clear where they begin, many scenes i will flip back and forth confusedly. Some of the scenes are pretty, but most of them just feel empty. the game is literally wandering around in a desolate feeling empty vaporwavish sci fi dystopian city, hearing gunshots and gangfights off in the distance, it does capture a syndicate like feel in a way. Random things happen and as you go on assignment for a mission the civilian AI will get increasingly violent and perform random fights with... whoever. The game really in some ways seems ahead of it's time maybe, it was compared to GrandTheftAuto (and it feels a bit like a mix between the 2d and 3d era transion for GTA) you can talk to people as you pass them by, random lines of voice acted text emerge from you and the receiving party, often they are curses but sometimes there are greetings. major characters (they are not too common) will have other dialogue of course. i havent' played shenmue but i imagine the game to play a bit like this in some ways. you can for example wander into a hospital (its hard to find buildings you are looking for thats one of my crits of this game) and if you are injured you can just demand medkit and they'll give you one and tell you to leave. there is quite a bit of randomization in how you can interact with a city that isnt really that large and feels somewhat just the right size for the sandbox style mission after mission between the factions that you go about doing. The basic recipe here isnt a bad one and it actually harkens back to what made the old 2600 classic Adventure a fascinating game to me. However anything this game has going for it really is ruined by the grievously impaired stability of seemingly random crashes and a lack of control in a game that demands arcade like gameplay at times. Even if i could read the text the nature of taking and giving items or using them is very awkward and esoteric. You can watch the one and only review of this game on youtube and the comments and those that actually have tried a campagin of the factions dont know if they win or lose by the end. seems that's a theme and hints at how abstract the mission objectives get. Fortunately you can save at any time and in multiple slots and it doesnt take but a moment to do it. I must be losing my mind but i actually found myself really liking this game and curious about the questing based on the video i watched. enough to actually play the game but the unreadable text was the deal breaker. i must be desperate to even try to dredge something up like this and then go about trying to get it working but the game is just different enough, and on that y2k millenial fringe to be weirdly interesting enough to hold my attention.

If anyone has a better go than i, i'd be curious to hear what you did, really though i dont feel it's worth it. Hence the title, a real shame. I was really looking forward to this one.