Syndicate Plus™

It is difficult for me, firstly, to categorize Syndicate, and secondly, to say what makes it attractive. This is not to say that it is a very intricate tactical strategy - its "turn-based" contemporaries X-Com and the first Jagged Alliance look much more solid in this sense. The simulation aspect of the game also doesn't shine: a sparse technology tree, a simple simulation of city life. It seems that the authors lost their inspiration halfway through, and simply left the game "as is". Even "spiritual successor", Satellite Reign, looks deeper than its predecessor. The interface also adds to the hassle: for example, you can control either all the characters, or a single one. But you can not break our combat four agents into separate links. It also narrows the room for tactical maneuver. The minimap is concentrated on agent, not on camera. Pathfinding is horrible. There is no stealth component in the game: from the very beginning, we have to reflect the waves of advancing opponents, miraculously knowing in advance where to look for us. But, nevertheless, you suddenly get involved into the game, especially if you don’t take it as a strategy, but rather as a lively dynamic arcade action game with elements of tactics (especially in the missions of the add-on, American Revolt). Unlike the strategies I mentioned, Syndicate often forces you to act randomly, improvisationally, by quickly and suddenly attacking enemy using firepower of entire squad. The levels are short and fast, like in arcades, although they become boring over time due to the repetitive design. Buildings can be used as shelters from enemy fire, and through persuadertron, you can turn the local population into your allies and human shields. The game is very atmospheric, due to the texts and graphics - as if you really command a squad of supercyborgs in bleak dystopian future. The levels often feel like small sandboxes where you can do almost what you want. In general quite solid and simply fun action game.

I played Syndicate back in the 90s. I kind of liked it then, and I don't like it now. I got this game for free, so I hope that you will too. It's not worth money today. The game has a lot of potential, but the controls are horrible. It lacks such simple but essential quality-of-life features, such as selecting/deselecting the whole squad with a hotkey, that make the game unnecessarily difficult to play after mission 10ish. The game relies too much on mousing. I would pay for a port of the Jaguar version, it would be much more fun. The pathfinding of everyone, your people, the enemies', and NPCs' is terrible. Everyone moves directly towards a point regardless of any obstacles in the way. They will walk inside of a building and into the wall opposing the entrance and continue walking into that wall until they get out after a while. One time I ran over one of my own agents with a car because most of the squad was in the car and they drove to the spot on the road and the ped agent walked to that point. Restart the mission. The missions get repetitive even without repeating them in response to rebellions. The game kind of acknowledges it with later-on mission objective texts being more terse and bland. Missions are either killing all enemy agents, killing a specific person while being harried by all of the enemy agents for 10 parsecs who know where you are within minutes of entering the mission area (I guess the enemy bosses also have a blimp [I love the blimp] that watches over the mission area), or kidnapping someone and again being attacked by all of the enemy agents from 20 parsecs. One time I had to kill all the police in the area which was a littly different, but still I had to deal with enemy agents, and there's basically no scripting for them, they just run at you from across the map and then start shooting at you. The equipment tech tree ramps up very quickly and so there are only two or three weapons that are worth using.

Syndicate is one of the best games ever created, its some kind of mix of rpg elements with an rts gameplay as idea, very fun and addictive. looking this title now makes me think about how much creativity was involved in gaming industry during 80's and 90's. The only regret is about the fact the Amiga version was by far superior compared to the pc one.

The Amiga version of Syndicate was one of the first games I bought, still have the box in very good condition :-) Anyway, this game is quite a gem, a true masterpiece and I can't recommend it enough! :-)

Probably biased... Who cares. I love this. Used to play it on my DX2 486 Pc a few decades back. Bought it today, started off with the first two missions. its such a great game, Bullfrog was WAY ahead of their time here. Its basically a looter shooter, squad based isometric RPG. Go bananas and kill everyone, or just off weaponized individuals while clearing missions and steal their weapons and use for future weapon research/ sales. This game is soo good and i love it as much today as i did back then which does not go for many games. But for the name of lords and such, why.... why is there no remake/ reimaging of this... Im not even considering the 2012 game cause it has nothing to do with this brilliant game.