There is a particular kind of pleasure in discovering that an old game is stranger than its reputation suggests. You expect stiff corridors, chunky enemies, and twenty-year-old design habits waiting to trip you up. Then somebody asks you to hack a computer through a DOS-like interface, another mission lets you sneak past trouble instead of blasting through it, and suddenly you are wondering how many ideas this forgotten shooter was trying to cram into 1998.
That feeling carries SiN Reloaded. Nightdive Studios has given SiN another pass after its earlier SiN Gold restoration, modernizing the controls, refreshing the presentation, and adding enough options that playing on a controller feels natural. On PS5, aiming and shooting behave much like a contemporary twin-stick FPS, weapon and item wheels keep equipment manageable, and gunfire has satisfying weight. Enemies react violently to good shots, headshots matter, and ammunition still deserves some attention. The controls stop you from wrestling with history before you can enjoy it.
Once that barrier falls away, the fascinating thing is how restless SiN still feels. John Blade spends plenty of time charging through rooms with guns raised, yet the campaign keeps reaching for ideas around the shooting. Damage is tracked across different parts of Blade’s body.
Computers function as interactive systems rather than glowing buttons. Some missions allow alternate approaches. Vehicle sections briefly change the rhythm. Stealth can occasionally replace direct combat, and optional paths mean players can miss substantial pieces of a level. You can see the ambitions of a shooter trying to stretch beyond the corridor-to-corridor structure associated with its era.
Those ideas do not always produce graceful results. Some stages settle into ordinary hallway combat, and the underwater sequence is memorable for the wrong reason: direction becomes difficult to read because the surroundings blur together. Darkness causes similar trouble elsewhere, particularly when the main campaign denies you the flashlight that later appears in Wages of SiN. Elexis Sinclaire’s mansion, her laboratory, and the casino have enough personality to remind you what the level design can accomplish, which makes the flatter stretches easier to notice.
Driving sits in the same uncomfortable territory. The remaster improves the vehicle handling, yet getting an ATV or forklift to behave can still feel like negotiating with machinery that resents your presence. Vehicles can move awkwardly or struggle to stay where you want them. Thankfully, these sequences are brief enough that the frustration rarely has time to dominate the campaign.
I found myself forgiving those frustrations because SiN has so much personality wrapped around them. John Blade looks like an action figure that somehow learned sarcasm, while hacker partner J.C. supplies constant commentary from the sidelines. Their friendship comes through mostly by roasting each other, and the dialogue frequently reaches a level of corniness that circles back toward charm. Enemies contribute their own ridiculous lines as bullets start flying.
The wider tone is equally difficult to separate from the year that created it. Blade is a mountain of muscle and sunglasses. Elexis Sinclaire is an exaggerated femme fatale. Sexualized imagery, crude jokes, dated references, and occasional nudity sit comfortably beside the explosions. Some of it earns a laugh. Some of it earns the sort of grimace you make when an old friend repeats a joke they really should have retired. It is still unmistakably SiN.
Nightdive’s smartest choice is refusing to decide how much of that history you should experience. The visual upgrade can be switched back toward the SiN Gold presentation while you play, letting you compare the restored graphics against something closer to the older look. Even the obsolete loading screens remain, flashing their rendered artwork despite modern hardware barely needing them anymore. They serve no practical purpose. I am glad they survived.
Mechanical options follow the same philosophy. Players can keep streamlined modern conveniences, enhanced weapons, revised pickup behavior, and newer interface features, or move closer to the older experience. The remaster is constantly offering a choice between smoothing history out and letting its rough texture remain under your fingers.
Wages of SiN strengthens the package further. The expansion can be accessed independently, and some of its additions can influence the base campaign. Its weapon selection is livelier too. The crossbow and flamethrower encourage greater experimentation, while the original campaign makes it easy to rely on a few dependable favorites such as pistols and the shotgun. It is amusing that an expansion can make you slightly resent the perfectly functional arsenal you spent hours using before it.
The campaign eventually stumbles at its final hurdle, with an underwhelming boss and an ending whose cliffhanger weakens the sense of accomplishment. It is a frustrating finish because the story moves cleanly through most of its escalating mutations, conspiracies, and corporate villainy before suddenly asking you to accept less closure than the adventure deserves.
Yet the thing that stayed with me afterward was the Vault. Promotional art, renders, sketches, design documents, storyboards, texture samples, development footage, a scanned instruction manual, and a period magazine article turn the extras menu into a small archive of the game’s existence. These materials let you see the thought around SiN, including ambitions and ideas that the final product could express only imperfectly.
That is where SiN Reloaded becomes especially easy to care about. It does not make a convincing case that every part of this shooter escaped 1998 intact. Its driving remains awkward, some levels feel plain, the humor can age badly, and the finale disappoints. What survives is curiosity.
You can still feel developers testing how much story, interaction, choice, comedy, and mechanical weirdness they could squeeze into a first-person shooter before the genre settled into many of the conventions we now take for granted. Nightdive gives those experiments room to breathe again without sanding away the evidence of when they were made, and the awkward parts belong in that archive too.
The Review
SiN Reloaded
SiN Reloaded succeeds because Nightdive understands that preservation means keeping the strange parts alive alongside the good ones. The shooting feels sharp, the campaign still surprises with its hacking, alternate approaches, and mechanical oddities, and the Vault gives this forgotten FPS a history worth exploring. Awkward driving, uneven levels, dated humor, and a weak finale remain, yet they never erase the curiosity running through the experience. This is an affectionate restoration of a game whose rough edges are part of why it deserves another look.
PROS
- Satisfying, weighty gunplay
- Smart modernization options
- Surprisingly varied campaign design
- Excellent archival Vault
- Strong late-'90s personality
CONS
- Awkward vehicle sections
- Uneven level design
- Some humor has aged poorly
- Weak final boss and ending
