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.
