It's definitely worth having a look. I got it for next to nothing a couple of years ago and it was amazing. The only problem were the bugs, but the community took care of most of them making the game playable. However, I reached one part and the game kept crashing, so I never finished it...
There is a community patch that, AFAIK, pretty much fixes the lot.
Change of subject:
~Syndicate.
I would like to rant about them remaking this as an FPS. Is nothing sacred? I mean, seriously?
Exactly what could an FPS Syndicate add to the Sci-Fi FPS genre? Anything interesting it could do has already been done better by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It's just 'doing a Lucas' and raping a classic game, raping it 'till there's nothing left but a hollow shell and yet another rotting corpse where one of my childhood dreams used to nestle, snugly, innocently watching 'Space: Above and Beyond'.
At last count there were about 935 Billion identi-kit Sci-Fi FPS games. In 20 goddamn years, there has never been another top line game along the lines of Syndicate. Nothing. Not a sausage. The nearest I can think of is Dragon Age: Origins, and even that lost so much that I loved about party based RPGs - namely back in the day I used to be able to customise much more freely, and because the tech and money wasn't there to have generic voice acting ruining my sexy female NPCs by giving them all US accents I could just imagine character upon a blank slate. Something I could and still can do much better than the writing in all bar a select few games I've played - Deus Ex for example - and part of the joy of that was the way it still left a lot for me to fill in.
Anyway, back to Syndicate, why exactly wouldn't this game work? With today's graphics you could make an absolute, utter monster of a game. A sort of isometric, future GTA type thing with guns and carnage on a truly epic scale. Massive cities, a fully rotatable and zoomable camera. Maybe even implement a genius feature from Dungeon Keeper if you must have an FPS element - namely the ability to 'possess' one of your men and roam around in first person mode for greater control while your buddies are acting under the orders you gave them.
As much as I love games, and I do, I really, hugely do, it always depresses me that the gap between what games are capable of and what they actually do has grown bigger and bigger, and in the exact opposite direction to what I dreamed of as a kid.
Think about a game like Frontier: Elite 2.
There's you.
There's your ship.
There's the whole fucking universe.
Enjoy.
That ran on an Amiga, off a 512k floppy disk with 1mb of RAM. That's it. Most fucking shoelaces these days have more processing power then that, yet how many games even come close to attempting that kind of scope or freedom?
Instead of more genres, more imagination as the sheer possibilities become realisable, we get clone FPS after clone FPS, generic RTS games and generic RPGs.
Not that there's anything wrong with a good FPS or a good RTS or whatever, but where is the successor to, say, Descent?
Never played it that much but put me in some kind of ship, have me pilot that, let me control other ships from that, in underground tunnels or maybe a city or something.
Or Mechwarrior. I mean, FFS, why do I have to run around with a shotgun when I could be in a fucking 300 foot tall epic metal engine of death?
Anyone remember Walker back in the day? You towering over these tiny, lemming sized people that you massacred by the bucketload yet they still kept coming back...
Or Moonstone anyone? You are a knight, massacaring a brilliant variety of creatures in gory glory, and beasts so terrifying they could actually one shot kill you, as you shat yourself, before you figured out how to kill the bastards?
Every single game I've mentioned could be remade. Could be utterly and completely epic. Has ideas and scope that blow 99.9% of games out now out of the water.
Yet what gets made? Modern Fucking Borefare 12. Click on head to kill. Perks perks perks. If you haven't got the twitch reflexes of a speed-mainlining ADHD fucking spider then say goodbye to ever feeling like you're good at the game.
OK, OK, harsh on that game - a lot of the reason I dislike it is because I'm shite at it.
But come on, who's with me? You know I make sense. We live in an age where games could be almost anything, could do almost anything, could take those awesome, awesome ideas from the early days and make them SOAR.
Yet what's happening instead?
Syndicate. Remade. As a fucking FPS.
Pffffffft.
Praise be to Skyrim. Even if it has become simpler, more, urrgggh, 'accessible', at least it's devs get that side of gaming. An open world - and the freedom to go wherever your imagination can take you.