Syndicate Wars™

Along with the original Syndicate, few games of old still make me want to open up a command prompt and type their names. Syndicate Wars had awesomely beautiful graphics for it's time - which was only expected, after the first one. SW takes a difference from the first in it's story: you have already gained dominance over the other Syndicates of the world, EuroCorp dominated the world, implanted everyone with their chips and all that. But someone thinks they can do better. Enter the Church of the New Epoch, Zealots are their agents, and to burn EuroCorp and it's UTOPIA is their mission. Will you be an EuroCorp executive, or a disciple of the Church?

The game itself is a classic and as good as ever, however I bought this GOG version thinking that it has been made to work smoothly on modern computers, which sadly turned out to not be the case. This GOG version has serious bugs with the mouse control. Already in the UI the mouse sometimes jumps suddenly, but more severe is that every once in a while during the mission the mouse gets "snapped" to one of the screen sides and becomes unusable. You have to alt-tab out and kill the app. This is infuriating because you can't save during the mission, so you will lose the progress. This bug has been reported to GOG already 10 years ago but has never been fixed.

AN ACQUIRED TASTE - you need nostalgic feelings AND extreme glitch tolerance to like this version of the game. The game has godlike weapon selection such as wire traps and the street-sweeping champion Nuclear Grenade that enable numerous different ways to beat the levels. It also has godawful controls, e.g. a mouse aim requiring pixel-perfection to hit things, unable to select specific squad members without black magic, a super common glitch with picking multi-quantity items (seems like an bug in the max items check) and unability to get selected agents to shoot reliably. You have four agents, though they usually end up in a box or a line formation, meaning that the dudes in the back often fail to range and sight the enemy. Very often you will have your controlled dude shooting and the rest doing barely anything. You should never try to fix that by getting closer to the targets as that is a fast way to get your squad killed. Even though your dudes can tank like a Sherman tank, that is not much as the biggest issue is getting stunlocked by continuous enemy firepower. Whatever your strat is, it will incorporate lots of running and not getting caught. Enemies, too, are tanks. Please try the Vexilium "PC source port" because the the out-of-the-box DOSBox one has serious issues with regular game-breaking glitches. It is most likely related to the Magic Carpet 3D engine and how it was stretched from the parallel development project Dungeon Keeper to accommodate this game too. More difficult than S+. Most of the glitches and hangs reek of variable overflow issues, e.g. the mouse pointer getting permanently stuck to the left edge of the screen that can be remedied beforehand by moving the pointer to the left side, as if causing the horizontal screen location variable to properly reset to zero. These glitches become more common in later levels with a lot of objects, implying an engine issue. There was one hang when a turret was blown up by an particle-intensive rocket.

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

Not for sure why but this is a bad port to dosbox. The game back in the day was pretty cool but the sound breakup ruins this port. Always come back to see if GOG ever fixed it or just purely just left it for sales. Game still looks like it did back in the day that I can remember, just the sound popping and stuttering, which even causes screen freezing.