This game is hard as hell.

It's not that the mechanics are particularly difficult - it's basic MOO stuff. Anyone familiar with other MOOs (Wayfar 1444, HellMOO, Cybersphere) will feel at home immediately, and it's not so different from a MUD that learning the parser feels like a chore. The big hurdles for this game are twofold.

1) Sindome is not a power fantasy.

Your character rolls into the city with frankly pathetic stats and skills, zero connections, no knowledge, no money, no inherent worth or value, and the game world treats you as such. Everyone above you (which is to say, every other PC and NPC) has achieved what they have by fighting tooth and nail for it, and they're not about to break you off a piece without a fight. You will be abused, robbed, cheated, lied to, stomped into the dirt, and pushed around. The friendships you make are tenuous: PCs you know and love will get dragged into factions that require them to cut ties with you. They will find themselves in bad situations where they have to steal from you to get by. They will sell you out to get ahead. And all of this creates the drama and conflict that you can strive to overcome time and again.

Even the strongest most well-connected characters are constantly going through cycles of horrible defeat, clawing their way back to the top, and exacting revenge. Nobody gets to skate by without any trouble, and no one gets off easy. This is not a power fantasy, it's a game about gambling, losing it all, and finding the determination to come back to try again.

2) The mechanics are kept IC

There's no wiki listing what stats go to what skills. The help files are sometimes spare. You will be at a loss as to how to build your character, and if you agonize over that sort of thing you are going to get frustrated when you ask questions OOC and get told to find out IC. Some people act like this is arbitrary (you don't have to look far to find a review complaining about how no one would tell someone what stats he needed to be a sniper or whatever), but it's meant to reinforce the first point: You are not a badass and you're not allowed to become a badass by reading a wiki. You have to engage with the game, experiment, talk to people, and lose until you find out how to win. A significant percentage of your RP will come out of learning how to do things in-character rather than looking them up OOC. This holds true for deckers, street sams, medics, or any other archetype. The end result is that the player characters who are the best in their field got there because they worked for it in-character.

Once you've got your head around those two ideas, there's a lot to dig into. The game has a robust playerbase and there are any number of directions to take a new character. The combat and travel mechanics (especially flight) are very well done and cybernetics and gadgets are a lot of fun to play with, though I will say that outside of these areas there's still work that could be done. The game lacks cyberpunk's usual cyberspace elements, instead using an in-world intranet that you can access via your browser for IC emails and forums. Many corporate jobs currently lack a lot of tangible job-related activity for players to dig into, which means that players in these roles get a significant amount of money dumped in their laps and are expected to make their own fun (read: crime) with it. Unless your archetype is combat-related, consider not leaning -too- hard into it and go in with the understanding that you'll want to do activities that go beyond the basic stated function of your job or role.

Crime is the focus here. Sindome's roots are clearly in works like Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic, but playing the game often feels more like living in the world of Grand Theft Auto. Even characters who attempt to keep on the straight and narrow are going to find themselves surrounded by baldly amoral jackasses, casual ultraviolence, and dark humor. It's an immersive RP world where the bad guys always win until the worse guys show up. If you can roll with the punches and want Vampire: The Masquerade level scheming with heart-pounding PVP, Sindome might be the game for you.