SiN: Reloaded brings the 1998 PC shooter to modern consoles

Nightdive Studios released SiN: Reloaded this week, bringing Ritual Entertainment's 1998 first-person shooter to home consoles for the first time alongside a modern PC update. The $29.99 package bundles the base campaign with the 1999 Wages of SiN expansion pack. It is available now across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam.

The worst release window in PC gaming

The studio was formed in 1996 by former id Software and Apogee developers who had just finished the first Quake mission pack. They built an incredibly ambitious action game on the id Tech 2 engine and shipped it in November 1998. That was just weeks before Valve released Half-Life.

SiN was notoriously buggy at launch, and colliding with a genre-defining juggernaut buried it almost immediately. It became a cult classic instead of a blockbuster franchise, though Ritual would go on to make Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2 and Star Trek: Elite Force II. You play as John Blade, a commander in a private security force in the futuristic city of Freeport. The main antagonist is Elexis Sinclaire, a biochemist mutating the local population. The setup is pure nineties comic book material, complete with an aggressively edgy attitude.

DOS prompts and location damage

The game tried things that were practically unheard of at the time. Enemies reacted differently depending on where you shot them, which was a novelty in 1998. Levels had branching objectives based on your actions, meaning you could fail a secondary goal without failing the entire mission. You could walk up to in-game computer terminals and type actual DOS commands to hack security cameras, read emails, or unlock doors.

This remaster runs on Nightdive's proprietary KEX Engine, the same framework the studio used to restore Turok and Quake. It supports 4K resolutions and framerates up to 144 FPS. If you prefer the original look, there is a toggle to switch back to the raw 1998 presentation on the fly. The inclusion of the Wages of SiN expansion is a nice touch, as mission packs from that era often get left behind in modern ports.

Translating the keyboard

I am genuinely curious how the terminal hacking translates to a modern gamepad. Typing commands was a core part of the PC experience, and this is the first time the game has ever appeared on a home console. Nightdive completely overhauled the controller support for this release, so the UI has been updated to accommodate thumbsticks. We will see if navigating a fake DOS prompt with a D-pad holds up.

The project had a long road to release. 3D Realms originally announced a remaster back in 2020 before Nightdive took over development and re-revealed it earlier this year. Stephen Kick founded Nightdive in 2012 specifically to rescue games trapped in licensing limbo, and SiN fits perfectly into their catalog of resurrected PC shooters. The final result preserves a weird, ambitious piece of late-nineties design that most people missed the first time around.