One of those games I just keep going back to!
You a John Blade a member of HardCorps (basically the police of the future) you have to go up against SinTek a mega corporation that has lots of power and money. Your nemesis at SinTek is the sexy, evil seductress Elexis Sinclaire who claims that she is mother nature. You must stop her and her nefarious plans.
Good Points:
Great graphics.
Hit detection on various body parts.
Great weapons.
Interactivity.
Lots of Speech.
Bad:
Some poor voice acting.
Repetitive lines from enemies.
A few bugs and glitches remain.
Weak sound.
AI isn't that great
The graphics in Sin are great for the time. Levels are intricately detailed (for the most part) and most look really impressive. There is the occasional level that needed a little more work and some texture glitches but these are by no means common. The particle effects are as you would expect from the Quake 2 engine nothing advanced by todays standards but really cool for that time.
Sin features superb hit detection. Like in SoF shoot body parts and you'll see results you'd expect. Shoot someone in the head and they'll go down with a hole in their head :D. Shoot someone in the chest and you'll see there body armor become damaged. This hit detection also means you take damage to different body parts as well but thankfully you can pick up various pieces of body armor from around the level and of course of downed enemies. Lucky shots can also make you drop your weapon and that's kinda cool.
All the weapons in the game fun to use and look highly detailed. Unfortunately they sound weak. I expect a heavy machine gun to sound awesome and really loud not tinny.
Every level is highly interactive, go into a room and almost everything can be destroyed or used in some way. Shoot furniture (bad furniture), shoot pictures, use computers to open security doors or to find out security codes etc (insert nod to Doom 3 here). This level is interactivity had never been seen before and it really adds a sense of immersion to the game.
There is a lot of speech in Sin both in game and in cut scenes. The in game audio is mostly OK but there are some great jokes in there and some great cheesy moments as well. Some of the voice acting of the enemies is poor and during the game the enemies do repeat the same lines over and over again. That does get annoying but it's even more satisfying when you down them.
The initial release of the game had compatibility problems with certain sound cards, long load times, bugs, texture glitches. I had issues with my Sound Blaster PCI64 looping sound on this game, a simple console command solved it but it still shouldn't have had a problem in the first place. The patch for it was over 10MB back in those days the internet was dial up. These problems meant it never really got the attention it deserved.
In Sin the AI isn't the best i've ever seen even for back then. The AI will usually run backwards and forwards. On some levels the AI is scripted to kick over tables and use them for a bit of cover. The AI mostly relies on numbers rather that intelligence which is kinda sad but this was back in 1998.
Overall Sin is a fun game with some great jokes in it. It has a level of interactivity that was unseen in those days. The story isn't bad but it's certainly no Half Life. It a game that's worth playing and I game that I keep coming back to.
Game version: Steam Version with April 18 2006 update installed.*
Review System: QX6850, 4GB RAM, 768MB Geforce 8800GTX, SB Audigy 2 ZS, XP SP2.
* I've played both the Steam version and the original 1998 version.