Syphon Filter

The Good
I did not get the chance to play Syphon Filter at the time of its release but bought a used copy many years later and played it on original hardware.

The levels can be broken down into four different types: shooting, stealth, escort, and darkness. Shooting makes up the majority of sequences in the game: You walk, run, climb, shoot, and sometimes interact with objects in the environment. In stealth, you have to be cautious and avoid being discovered. During escort, your task is to protect friendly AI until they reach a target zone. In darkness sequences, the lights go out and you have to survive an onslaught of enemies while you can see only through night vision goggles. While I was generally not fond of the stealth and escort sequences, the shooting and the tense darkness were engaging.

The first level was even impressive: You fight alongside friendly AI in city streets and inside of buildings. Locational damage is great: You can avoid the first boss fight entirely if you take him out with a precise head-shot from afar. The graphics are blocky, but they have their charm. The frame-rate was also consistent in most levels. I thought the fire effects were excellent for their time. The soundtrack sets the mood, even though the tracks felt not particularly memorable to me.

Later levels introduce new environments, a wide variety of weapons, and more of the plot. There was never a moment in the game where I did not want to keep playing.

The Bad
Overall, I did enjoy the game. There are some flaws that pretty much all the reviews I read online did not mention, which is why I go into a bit more detail here. I hope I don’t sound overly critical; I know Syphon Filter was groundbreaking for its time.

Syphon Filter is a difficult and occasionally unfair game with stiff controls that loves to put you into ambush situations. There are many, many situations in which enemies spawn right next or right behind the player, and you get less than a second to react before you get killed or before the mission fails for other reasons. It happens quite frequently in the later levels of the game.

What can really mess with you is the automatic targeting system. The game is pretty much broken in situations in which you are swarmed by enemies and have to quickly dispatch specific ones. An example is a helicopter fight on a rooftop: Waves of soldiers jump from the helicopter down onto the rooftop, and each time you have to manually target and head-shot them because the automatic targeting system will always lock on to the helicopter instead of them. I got killed so many times in this sequence because it wouldn't lock on to the soldiers who were mere feet away, shooting at me with assault rifles. This even happens even when the helicopter is not visible on the screen, blocked from view by a building. Imagine standing right in front of an enemy, pressing R2 to target, and your character turns in the complete opposite direction to fire at an unseen target before getting shot in the back and killed. This happens so frequently I have no idea why reviews from 1999 do not even mention this problem.

I think this is one of the reasons why the odd „danger meter“ was included: You only start taking damage after it has filled up, after enemies have taken a couple of shots at you. This is probably supposed to give you more time to react while you wrestle with the controls.

But when enemies use explosives, the danger meter won’t help you: For example, enemies with grenades are absolutely deadly. Even if you immediately turn and run after you see an enemy lob a grenade, it often is too late. Their aim is perfect, and grenades explode as soon as they hit the ground near you. Game over.

The key to beating Syphon Filter therefore is to learn how to abuse how enemies can't see around corners whereas you can due to the third-person perspective of the game.

Moving away from the shooting sequences: What I don't like about the stealth missions is that there is often only a single way to beat the mission and you get seconds to react to new enemies when you enter a room. You can only beat these if you have already memorized everything. If you go into a new room without knowing what to expect, you will instantly die or fail the mission due to an alert that gets raised. You just have to know in advance where the guards will appear and how you can dispatch them quietly. These missions require a tremendous amount of patience because you have to replay them very often.

Escort missions could also be a nightmare: The friendly AI can't hold their own and need constant babysitting, yet immediately yell at you should you ever fall behind yourself.

Furthermore, the story is rather bland. It is just enough as a framework for the missions. There is a lot at stake, but it doesn't feel like it. You foil the terrorists’ plan in the first level. Then you destroy their military base. Then you destroy their secret hideout… Characters are Gruff McMilitary, Standard Female Love Interest, and Boss With Sunglasses. Clichéd characters in a clichéd story about super-spies and bio-terrorists. It is schlock. It could be fun, but it is dry and takes itself way too seriously.

The boss fight at the end is easily the most broken thing in the game. He spawns right next to you, has a grenade launcher that kills you with one hit, and he is impervious to all weapons. There is only one specific way to defeat him, but good luck figuring that out by yourself.

The Bottom Line
Based on what I read in reviews, my expectations were very high initially. Syphon Filter started out promising, with an action-packed first level, innovative mechanics, good level design, and great effects. The game made me want to keep playing.

Near the end, I realized I was using walk-throughs a lot and did not have a lot of fun playing the game anymore. There were just too many unfair situations and too many times retrying a particularly difficult checkpoint to finally get it right. Replay the same unfair sequence 20-30 times and it will stop being fun.

Still, as one of the early releases in this genre, the developers did a commendable job and I can certainly see why the game is sometimes considered a classic.