Syndicate Plus™

I remember liking this a lot when I was growing up but it definitely is showing it's age. The pathfinding is terrible and the controls are a bit difficult at times. I still enjoy the game and it's well worth a shot but having some community mods or something to update the game would do it a lot of favors.

This game is not as good as it's cracked up to be. You'll command a team of up to 4 - and you're supposed to guide them in an RTS-style strategy style with elements of X-Com. What you will actually do is click like you're playing Diablo. The game moves too fast and the interface is too clumsy for any more strategy than "everyone open fire" (or "charm all the other characters on screen". So allright there's two strategies). Yes there's new weapons and upgrades and so on and they add a bit of variety, but the strategy is essentially the same. Fun for a few missions but rapidly gets very dull. Also you'll unlock all of the upgrades by halfway through the game. So once you've got a team that works, you'll barely change your loadout. So...yeah. Interesting in that I now know what everyone was talking about, and it's not bad. But not as good as it's cracked up to be.

If you are unaware, the Devs for the Syndicate series could not reuse the name, but they basically made Syndicate 3 but had to call it Satellite Reign instead. If you want to get your fix of Syndicate on modern hardware, I would highly suggest looking at that one which is also on GoG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/satellite_reign

The concept is really interesting, I don't remember playing something quite like this before and makes me want to give Syndicate Wars a try. However, the missions become quite repetitive really fast, plus the controls, the UI and graphics are not helpful at all. I was left wanting more, overall the gameplay feels rather shallow. Give it a shot if you want to play something innovative, but don't expect to get many hours of fun from this one.

Just "nostalgia" doesn't cover it. Syndicate has many qualities that make it perfectly playable today, although some might find it simplistic for being non-3D isometric and low-res. The graphics are low-res as I said, very small characters, but pretty sharp. The color palette is somewhat limited (the cities and structures are always in shades of gray, green or some pale brown), but perhaps that was supposed to add to atmosphere, a grim vision of future (or it was just limited). Explosions do look nice though, cutscenes too (but there aren't many). You can research technologies so you have access to better weapons and your agents can be augmented (to shoot faster, better aim, resist longer). That managerial aspect of the game is simple, but not too bad, nor too complicated. The mission gameplay is simple too. You move your agents around, shoot people, shoot other agents (which is cool, they're well equiped like your own agents), shoot police officers, get other people to follow you, drive cars. It's all very simple (you shoot once or twice and they stop moving, cars only move to one direction), but it works. If you ask me, works better than its sequel Syndicate wars. Gameplay has problems too. Sometimes it's hard to navigate through the isometric cities. It's easy to get lost behind walls and inside buildings. Annoying. I think the sound, although obviously repetitive, is great. Most people might disagree because most people hate game music anyway. Music is atmospheric, shooting sounds are average, voices are ok (repetitive but well done for a DOS game). There's only two speeches I can recall now: a voice says "selected" in a robotic voice when you select something, and when a police officer sees you with guns blazing he tells you to holster your weapon. Nowadays I suppose the main qualities of the game are both the consistency of gameplay and the challenge. You know what to expect of the game, and the escalating challenge makes it better while you get better and better weapons. It's exciting to shoot agents dead with a minigun, because they have miniguns of their own and you have to be quick about it. People who don't mind this being a non-3D game (i.e.: people who like good DOS games in general) are sure to like this classic, because that's what it is. It's solid fun.