I've got quite opposite reaction. I regret spending any money on it. It's super slow and annoying at the beginning, because there are very large no-save areas and anything that brings guards attention gets you killed in there. (so it's only stealth game) On the other hand there's lots of comments saying (didn't get to that stage) that once you get through lots of missions, you raise an army of tanks that can kill anything in the way without stopping. I had really high hopes for this game, but it's just not Syndicate.
I don't remember about the saves actually, but the feeling is completely different. While on most Syndicate missions you could actually exchange fire and back off / reevaluate, in this game any action causes more people to hear you and join in. That means you need to either sneak around the whole time, or be prepared to take 10 enemies at once. And even sneaking around is hard because of cameras.
It wouldn't even be that bad if you could replay the whole mission in 5-10 minutes like I remember from Syndicate. But in SR even walking around feels super slow. It's just not the same kind of action. You sneak around for 15 minutes, take out guards one-by-one, then suddenly you're spotted by the last remaining one and reinforcements come out from the building right next to you. You lose the whole squad, try again.
It may be a function of difficulty level, but even at the start it's feasible to go in shooting if you're a little tactical about it. I quite liked its puzzle nature as an increment over Syndicate - it's been years since I played it but I do remember it often coming down to finding a good corner to stand behind and machinegunning enemies as they came round it.
The one thing I do miss in SR from Syndicate is that in SR all targeting is manual, whereas if you ramp up one of the sliders in Syndicate they'll pick their own targets.
That is what frustrated me about it at first. Once I got through those tedious first few levels though, and you unlock some of the more fun power-ups, the game gets enjoyable.
I'd love to read the blog posts describing how they disassembled and reassembled the game, those details are more interesting to me than playing the game :)
It's not about Syndicate Wars, but this guy spent years reversing the Outrun arcade ROM and blogging about it. It's a fascinating read: http://reassembler.blogspot.com/
... and I spent more than an hour reading his blog from the last few years. Man, what an interesting set of projects. I'm seriously jealous of his ability to restore and emulate hardware!
Yes, where's the tools? Are they not public? A good set of RE tools would enable the porting and fixing of a huge number of DOS and DOS/4GW games. This has been done for XCOM (resulting in OpenXCOM) but there are plenty of other worthy modernisation targets.
Freesynd looks like its for 'Syndicate' - this is for 'Syndicate Wars' which was the sequel to Syndicate. As a player, they were quite different games and engines.
http://satellitereign.com/the-game/
Which is a quite decent updated version of the concept. Has one or more of the original Syndicate guys working on it and was quite fun to play.