Syndicate Plus™

This game is incredible fun. You control a team of up to 4 syndicate agents with cybernetic enhancements, which you use to complete different types of missions (kill, protect, persuade) to conquer territories for your organization. with the tax money from conquered territories, you can further equip and enhance your agent, and spend money on research to invent better weapons and cybernetics. By increasing the drug levels given to your agents, they even act autonomously, shooting enemies when they come into range, saving you from having to micro-manage each agent at all times. It is a bit short, but the time it does last is time spent in much enjoyment. In many respects, it reminds me a little about UFO: Enemy Unknown, although the combat is real-time and not turn based, but you have the same thrill of money management and research to upgrade your team, making them better at kicking the asses of your enemies.

First class. Ingenious. Bullfrog were the master creators of this title which, not only bears a brilliant story (Of Hollywood proportions) but of game play too. Syndicate may not seem like much when you play it for the first time, but after a few tries (And giving the manual a thorough read) you will find it to be difficult to put down. Followed by Syndicate Wars (Which i am praying will be released here soon) and the recently released prequel Syndicate (2012).

This game was awesome but the basic game was too tame. We need the expansion.

I also happen to have a nostalgic recollection of this game from when it was new. But I was a kid at the time and didn't really stick with it, for reasons I couldn't have explained before re-buying and re-playing via GOG. Boy howdy, I can sure explain today! This is a boring, boring slog of a torture device. Repetitive, redundant, full of filler, frustrating. Extremely rudimentary pathing logic means your number one second-by-second chore will be micromanaging your squad's movement… to the point that it becomes less painful overall to use a single team member. There is no real demand for actual real-time, co-ordinated squad tactics as a result, even though numerous alternative game design choices — yes even for the time and technology levels — could easily have been made to support this. For example, make the game a top-down instead of isometric because guess what? In order to move accurately through the very complex multi-level cityscape you need to use the minimap so it boils down to this anyway! Clicking repeatedly on a corner of the HUD that has devolved the graphics into an Atari 2600 experience with small yellow circles navigating around big light blue rectangles. That's Syndicate. And if you think I am being overly harsh, then I submit as proof the inclusion of the "IPA" levels system (which basically adds three progress-bar-style sliders to your UI management chores) because the most accurate way to get your squad to actually kill enemies is almost always to get them to aim and shoot for themselves! So, yay: your primary job as a mastermind corporate executive flying high over the city is to basically drive turrets around. Now, to be more upbeat I will agree nifty little concepts exist but these are mostly lore such as the flavour text for the upgrades. The bulk of the actual GAMEplay is woeful — and this would have been the case 'back then' as well. Do yourself a favour: just watch the intro sequence on Youtube. EVERYthing is downhill from there.

an very unintuitive user interface.... a remake would be nice