So, I never played the original SiN. To be fair, I was coming up on my 2nd birthday when it came out. By the time I was old enough to play a video game on my dad’s computer, it was more likely going to be Star Trek: Elite Force, one of the Half-Life games, or System Shock 2, the latter two containing content slightly more mature than was probably acceptable for a child. I wonder if that explains why I love horror so much: early exposure and acceptance?
Although Half-Life had changed the way we saw and played FPS games, the Doom and Quake model was still alive, with levels to work through, increasingly ridiculous enemies and the occasional cutscene to move things along. This is the model SiN used, and it even used the Quake II engine. Whereas Half-Life barely had cutscenes to speak of, the story moved on around you, the characters and events being part of the level. I could make my own camera angles because I could move around during what in other games would be a cutscene. Both games are ultimately built around shooting things until they die from it, but they represent two different points in the evolution of the FPS. SiN was still working within the established model, while Half-Life was starting to push beyond it.
Now, I’m not reviewing SiN: Reloaded from the point of view of “Half-Life was better”. SiN has its own identity, and quite a lot of that identity comes from being quite ridiculous. It is closer to a violent comic book or an over-the-top late 80s/90s action film than the grounded science fiction of Half-Life. The shooting is fast, the characters are exaggerated, the humour is very much of its time, and the violence can become cartoonishly excessive; there are moments when an enemy can take a point-blank shotgun blast and essentially become bad guy flavoured gazpacho.
Fortunately, the shooting itself still holds up reasonably well. There is a satisfying physicality to the weapons, and enemies react depending on where you hit them, whether that’s staggering after being shot in the leg or reacting differently to a shot to the head. Hearing enemies scream about how they are now blind because I shot their eyes out was at first a little funny, in keeping with the whole over-the-top action comic book style, but mostly harrowing when you think about it more. The weapon variety isn’t particularly impressive, and the pistols in particular become little more than something to use when you’ve run out of ammunition for the weapons you actually want to use. Dual-wielding does at least give you another option, although I found myself mostly switching weapons according to whatever ammunition I had available.
There are also some wonderfully old-fashioned decisions around exploration. In one level, I found parts for a weapon I hadn’t seen before, but apparently not all of them because I never got the weapon. I finished the level without it and haven’t seen it since, so either I’ve missed my chance entirely or SiN has decided I don’t deserve the gun. Modern games tend to be rather more interested in making sure you see everything they have to offer, whereas SiN is quite happy to hide something in a corner and let you carry on without it. That can be frustrating, but it also gives the levels a reason to be explored beyond simply finding the next objective marker.
The level design is probably one of the areas where SiN has aged better than I expected. There is usually enough space to poke around, find secrets and approach objectives without feeling as though you’re simply being funnelled down a corridor. Objectives can also change how you approach a level, which helps keep the older structure from becoming too repetitive. My main complaint is that exits aren’t always signposted particularly well, and I managed to move into the next section of a level before I had finished exploring the previous one. Most exits require some kind of interaction, so this isn’t a constant problem, but there were a couple of occasions where I would have appreciated a clearer indication that I was about to leave.
The difficulty curve is helped by the way new enemies are introduced. Once a new enemy type appears, it starts showing up more regularly, gradually becoming part of the game’s vocabulary rather than being a one-off encounter. Combined with the way enemies respond to different hit locations, this makes the combat feel a little more deliberate than simply pointing a gun at whatever is in front of you. The bosses are a different story, although not necessarily a bad one. They are very much products of the period, with the general strategy being to shoot the large thing until it stops moving, but sometimes that is exactly what you want from an old-school shooter.
Where the game has aged considerably less gracefully is in its writing. The story is pure comic book nonsense, complete with enormous personalities, exaggerated designs and humour that occasionally produces the reaction of, “Oof, that line really hasn’t aged well.” The main character and his technical sidekick also have a fairly repetitive relationship. The tech guy makes a joke, the protagonist threatens him, or the tech guy makes a joke and gets humiliated in response. It works for a while, but the repetition eventually makes the banter feel more like a routine that the game has forgotten to stop performing.
The character designs aren’t helping matters, although I suspect that is entirely intentional. The protagonist, John Blade (so 90s it hurts), looks like Stretch Armstrong was remoulded with a gym membership and given a much stronger jaw, while the female characters have such exaggerated proportions that even I have a backache. Some of the early animation even reminded me of the film Toy Soldiers, although SiN is obviously much more interested in guns and explosions. None of this is pretending to be realistic, and I don’t think it is supposed to.
The sound design is considerably less troublesome, with everything sounding clean enough to suit modern systems. The weapons sound good, and general effects are solid. There are some small visual issues, with textures occasionally flickering after being damaged, while others didn’t show at all, but these are minor enough that they never affected my experience. There’s not too much to say other than, ‘Job’s a good’un.’
There is one level that caused me considerably more irritation than the others because it forces you into stealth. I generally don’t enjoy forced stealth in games, particularly when the rest of the game has spent its time encouraging me to solve problems by shooting them. Being told that I now have to sneak around guards because the game has temporarily changed its mind about what sort of shooter it wants to be isn’t something I found particularly enjoyable. Fortunately, it is an isolated problem rather than something that defines the whole experience.
What is less of an isolated problem, and it may be because I’m so used to modern games, is the speed at which you move. No matter what you do, Blade flies around with incredible momentum. For a game with some platforming elements, it’s not the most relaxing experience. The amount of time I spent jumping from one platform to another only to run straight off it upon landing was frankly ridiculous. Blade moves like he’s always moving on ice, and in many situations that leads to death because you’re trying to stay on a small platform above a liquid that could be acid, but the momentum carries you straight off and back into the drink you go. Only this drink drinks you.
Reloaded improves the presentation considerably, with cleaner textures and character models, an adjusted HUD and a more readable interface. Even the font has been changed, although that comes at the expense of some of the original visual character. But there’s only so much you can modernise without making a different game. The level design, storytelling, characterisation and general structure are still very much those of a 1998 FPS, and that’s ok. If you think about it, Reloaded is not an attempt to redefine a game but to preserve an old one.
To further that idea of preserving a gaming experience, Reloaded also includes Wages of Sin, the original expansion, along with a selection of other additional content. So, there is more here than just the original campaign with a fresh coat of paint. It’s a complete SiN experience, sadly without the animated film.
There are a few concessions to modern players that I wasn’t particularly impressed by, either. The options menu feels as though it has been lifted from a PC game and dropped onto a console without quite enough thought about how it feels to use with a controller. There are some useful control responsiveness settings and colour or hue adjustments that could help some players, but there isn’t a dedicated colour-blind mode. The PS5 motion aiming is probably the strangest addition. Physically moving the controller around to aim, like a less responsive or intuitive Wii Remote, is such a baffling idea that whoever made it a thing should be immediately offered to the heathen gods of chaos they clearly worship. For Reloaded, I can’t figure out why it’s included; the game doesn’t support VR, and the speed of the game makes the slow movement of motion control a massive drawback.
None of that stopped me enjoying SiN, though. There is something quite refreshing about a shooter that is so unapologetically a product of its time. It doesn’t have the sophistication of Half-Life, the systemic design of System Shock 2 or the immersive approach of Thief, but it doesn’t really need to. It is a game about shooting people with increasingly large guns while an absurdly muscular protagonist wanders through levels populated by equally absurd enemies, and it is often a lot of fun when it stops trying to be anything else.
I don’t have the nostalgia that will make someone remember SiN the way they remember the games they grew up with, so I can’t tell you whether Reloaded perfectly recreates that experience. What I can say is that this version suits people who don’t want to spend hours getting an old game working through mods and patches, as well as console players who don’t really have that option. I enjoyed finally getting to see what I missed all those years ago, and I would happily return to it for another blast through its levels.
