SiN
Release Date - November 19, 1998 (NA)
Developer - Ritual Entertainment
Publisher - Activision
Platform - PC
This game is really dumb.
It’s also really fun.
That qualifies it as dumb fun.
No doubt there are many that would remember SiN from the numerous sultry magazine ads that were used to promote the game. Scantily clad women aside, there’s actually quite a lot to draw players to this action packed, over the top first-person shooter.
Ritual Entertainment cut their shooter-programming teeth with a Quake expansion pack; Scourge of Armagon (1997). They would follow up this expansion and put their experience to good use with SiN, a full retail release and an ambitious first-person shooter.
Some slick industrial areas await you in SiN.
The year is 2037, and John ‘Rusty’ Blade (a cheesy action hero name if there ever was one) is a member of private security force HARDCORPS. By now you probably already know what to expect from the story of this game. B-Movie fun and silliness is the order of the day as John and his computer-hacker partner, JC, track down a self-proclaimed messiah going by the nom-de guerre of ‘Mother Nature’. She is in fact, Elexis Sinclaire (the same latex clad woman from the magazine adverts). Elexis has a genius level intellect and is trying to transform humanity with her genetic experiments in a ruthless attempt to better the world at any cost. With an army of devoted followers, she has already flooded the populace with an addictive drug and has further plans underway to placate the masses.
Yes, this game is pure machismo and 90s action tropes condensed into a game. It’s a game that feels very much of its time, a evolution of the 90s shooter rather than a completely new format like Half-Life which released in the same year. This is by no means a bad thing at all, as 90s shooters are a lot of fun. The humour and tone is also very much a time-capsure of the era, and it hits home the minute you see the bulletin board with a picture of Monica Lewinski on it captioned ‘Employee of the Year’. It definitely feels like a game between eras, with the mostly fast paced and linear action of earlier shooters, but with the graphics and some aspects of storytelling of games that would follow. It’s a very interesting mix.
Ahhh Ms Sinclair, the still pictures don’t do this scene justice…
The graphics were awesome for the time, utilising the Quake II (1997) engine which had already proven to be a powerhouse and making improved use of colour for more vibrant levels in SiN. Like Quake II the levels, objects and characters were all in full 3D with impressively detailed models. Lots of destructible items litter the stages, and levels are built in multiple levels with intractable items.
SiN takes place mostly within the cyberpunk cityscape, with lots of familiar locations like office buildings, subways and industrial areas, but all with a sci-fi aspect. Things do shake up for more exotic locations as well, with an underwater level in a coral reef being particularly note-worthy. The relatable locations are coupled with some exciting set-pieces littered throughout, such as jumping across tall rooftops during gun-fights or using a wrecking ball to destroy scenery. There’s also a lot of interaction with desktop PCs and security terminals to unlock doors or de-activate security systems and the like, with the game taking the player into the text-based operating system to navigate the menu. Be quick, because the action around you does NOT stop and wait.
The shotgun does it’s bloody work, check out the exploded baddie on the left!
The various levels make for a compelling and exciting setting with lots of visual flair and rewards for players that stop and explore. Nice touches of humour are abound as well, in the first level you can even pick up a quarter and make a call to the movie hotline to hear the showtimes for fictional movies! Pointless, but a cool little easter egg.
Throughout the whole game you’ll be exposed to some nice interaction between John and his hacker accomplice JC. JC is a computer wiz-kid and will John through multiple jams, but always with a smart-mouth comment. John gives as good as he gets, often making fun of JC. While the game is full of cheese, the banter between the two felt quite refreshing, and sounded like two friends going at it with friendly (and usually somewhat lame) insults.
Oh yeah, now THIS is a 90s loading screen!
As expected of a first-person shooter with a character named ‘John Blade’, there are a lot of guns for you to shoot; shotguns, rocket launchers and chain-guns are all present and accounted for, as well as more exotic futuristic guns like the Quantum Destabilizer and Pulse Attack Cannon! There’s even a few on-rails sections where you’ll take control of a good old-fashioned turret for some sustained automatic fire. In some levels you’ll even find vehicles like forklifts or bulldozers to commit some vehicular carnage with! They handle like shopping carts, but they have some serious destructive power when you get speed up, turning enemies into chunks of flesh when you barrel into them, and smashing through the scenery.
It’s a good thing then, that there’s a lot of enemies to take down with the setting of the game allowing for not only human enemies, but more extreme experiments of the evil Elexis. Early on you’re introduced to one of these failed experiments, with some monstrous genetic experiments making up boss fights and more powerful enemies. Later in the game, these ‘freaky mutants’ will become more commonplace and provide some stiff resistance. Being honest, the AI of the enemies isn’t all that spectacular, but they make up for it in numbers and persistence. It means lots of opportunities for sustained automatic fire, yelling ‘Arghhhh’ as you unload magazine after magazine into them is optional but recommended.
The enemies in this game can take a LOT of bullets, don’t be afraid of pouring it on.
Perhaps one of the best additions to the formula is SiN’s armour system; rather than just being an overall number that protects you from damage uniformly, there is specific armour for different body parts. Your legs, torso and head all require different pieces of armour to be picked up to provide protection, and they also will degrade individually depending on where you’re hit. On rare occasions the enemy will even shoot the gun out of your hand!
You can pick up armour from your fallen enemies, but they have the same restrictions that you do! This means that unloading a lot of rounds into an enemy’s chest when they’re wearing a vest will mean that there’s not much chest armour for you to pick up when you search their corpse. On the other hand, you’re rewarded for a clean headshot, since the enemy’s armour will be relatively intact and ready for you to use! Different enemies have armour in different places too, so you’ll have to be perceptive of the best places to shoot baddies to avoid their heavily armoured areas. Armour or not, enemies will take damage to specific areas of their body, and it can get quite gory with body parts getting damaged or even severed.
As had become expected of shooting games of the late nineties, SiN also came with multiplayer modes that were somewhat similar to the multiplayer of Quake II.
Taking control of vehicles is a fun distraction and often a required puzzle solving element.
SiN unfortunately shipped with a number of (sometimes quite significant) bugs on launch. There was a patch released to fix these, but it unfortunately weighed in at a whopping 31 MB! Now this doesn’t sound like much now, but in 1998 this was huge, considering the internet was still mostly 56k speeds, if you had access to the internet at all! Activision actually took a drastic step of mailing CDs of the patch to customers who were in need, or didn’t want to blow out their dial-up internet bill with the download.
SiN had a strong opening month of sales, but subsequently dropped off. This may have been due to the release of the wildly popular Half-Life which was released in the same month. The game did well enough however to receive an expansion pack in 1999, Wages of SiN. There was also an anime adaption that was released in 2000 by ADV films, although this anime movie is only loosely based on the game. Finally, a failed attempt as an episodic series of releases was cancelled after the first episode, SiN Episodes: Emergence in 2006. The original game remains the most well-known and highly regarded entry for the franchise, and can still be purchased on digital storefronts for anyone wishing to relive the glory of this over the top, action-packed shooter.
Good news for fans of SiN in 2026, Nightfire Studios is currently working on SiN Reloaded, a remaster of the original game and the expansion pack for modern platforms with some quality of life improvements! This should prove to be the definitive edition of the game, so there’s no better time to check it out! Time to get schooled by John ‘Rusty’ Blade.
Dumb fun is good clean fun.