Sometimes Retro Gaming is Just Tedious

I play quite many retro games. I do it mostly to check what I missed when they were still fresh or just to play some­thing good. In most cases I can eas­ily get over the anti­quated game­play design, blurry tex­tures and blocky mod­els of ene­mies and the envi­ron­ment. What is more, some titles, like “No One Lives Forever” or “Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising” turn out to be real dia­monds that aged gracefully.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with “SiN” which I have just fin­ished. My expe­ri­ence with this one has been so hor­ri­ble I have had to turn god mode on just to get faster through final lev­els and be finally done with it. This is not because the game is old (it was released in 1998); I have the feel­ing I would not have enjoyed it twelve years ago either. From the corny plot about a sexy chemist lady lead­ing a giant cor­po­ra­tion and using it to turn all humans into mutants, to Blade, the game’s pro­tag­o­nist who really wants to be cool like Duke Nukem (although much more seri­ous and respon­si­ble) but just can’t, to unin­ter­est­ing ene­mies and lev­els designed so that their cre­ators can shout “gotcha!” as you fall into just another absurd trap result­ing in instant death, every­thing about “SiN” seems just not right.

The graph­ics are OK for an 1998 game. As far as I remem­ber, reviews regarded “SiN” as one of the pret­ti­est shoot­ers at the time and it is hard to dis­pute that. Other fea­tures like inter­ac­tive envi­ron­ment, mean­ing you can inter­act with objects that are not con­nected to mak­ing progress, were also praised. Today, how­ever, these strengths mean lit­tle and what we get is this strange, almost lin­ear FPS try­ing to offer small dose of free­dom by let­ting play­ers dis­cover sev­eral hid­den lev­els but fail­ing to strike the right bal­ance between all its ele­ments. To be fair, I am pretty sure a lot of effort went into mak­ing “SiN” what it was but in the end most of it was wasted.

If you are into retro gam­ing, you should def­i­nitely avoid “SiN”. I hope the sequel, “SiN Episodes: Emergence” will be more enjoy­able. It is still wait­ing on my Steam account for its turn.