Syndicate Plus™

You do not need Origins to run Syndicate of the past. I am running it mow without Origins. I love Syndicate and was happy when GOG finally released this even when the expansions was not released with it. Hope they may come in the time. I do not care for Syndicate wars.

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.

I can tell why this game was as popular as it was in its day, and for what it's worth, it still holds up as a playable game, as long as you've read the manuel of course. However, issues crop up almost immediately; bad pathfinding, hitscan enemies, bad ai escorts, broken missions scripts and other little details that show this games age. Having said that, it's a classic for a reason and definitely worth a few bucks if you have the patience for this sort of game.

well, the regular syndicate has a bit of learning curve, but then gets 'easy' if correctly prepared agents are used. obviously, old fashioned graphics and such, but wadda ya expect from a 90's game ;-)

One of those old school classics from the Amiga era, that is just worth giving a shot. Bullfrog o7