Players attempt to win by giving orders to a small squad of armed combatants, most commonly with the goal of eliminating all enemy units.

[1] The game and its soundtrack formed part of the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle[2] between 28 September and 12 October 2011, which ultimately grossed over $1 million and had over 230,000 downloads.

The player character is Tactics, a master tactician employed by the underground group Petrov's Shard, founded by Shand's former friend Graham Nix, with the goal of opposing the grasp of the company on the city; the organisation also employs the shapeform Belacqua, in charge of hacking, and Kate Soulsby, a former military which became a double agent within Enyo:Nomad.

The different missions are meant to improve Petrov's Shard position by performing sabotage acts, allying other factions, seizing facilities controlled by the company and ultimately confronting Shand and Charon's Palm at the Glass Tower located at the heart of the city.

[citation needed] The game was released for Windows and Mac OS X[4][5] on 26 May 2011, for Linux on 28 September 2011,[6] for iPadOS on 16 May 2013,[7] and for Android on 18 June 2013.

Of the experiment, Mode 7 Games developer Paul Taylor stated: "Honestly, it felt like vandalising my own work, which was interesting".

The expansion includes a new soundtrack for the game and a chiptune album by artist _ensnare_ (Paul Taylor's musician pseudonym) called Impeccable Micro, both available in MP3 and FLAC formats.

A remake for consoles, called Frozen Synapse Prime and developed by Double Eleven, was released on PlayStation Vita on 24 September 2014.

The game has received generally favourable reviews, holding a score of 85/100 on Metacritic,[12] with particular praise for its "newly composed, evocative" soundtrack.