Satellite Reign (2015)

Satellite Reign starts out great. There's an interesting opening cinematic, the world looks neat and you learn about different classes and their uses. Sadly, the game runs out of steam after the tutorial.

I played for over 3 hours and combat never changed. No new weapons, no skills, nothing. The enemy endlessly respawns anyway, so there's no reason to bother with it at all really.

Stealth works better and is a bit more interesting, but it's limited by numbers. You have to grind hacking skills to be able to actually do anything. And these are just a number. There's no "hack X object" or "make X hacked object do Y". There's just hacking level 1 through 5.

On of your characters has a special vision mode that highlights useable objects but makes the game boring to look at. You have to use this vision mode 95% of the time if you ever want to get any research done because otherwise you won't find randomly generated researchers.

Despite looking cool, the world is dead. There are no conversation. Acquiring mission info usually involves clicking in a menu. Sometimes you have to find a person to click on them and automatically bribe them. That's it.

The worst part about Satellite Reign is that it's completely soulless and inconsequential. Everything is numbers. Hacking? Numbers. Skills? Numbers, with a handful of exceptions. Cloning? Yeah, so you can dominate someone's mind and make them do your bidding. One of the options is sending them somewhere to be clone-fodder. Guess what this means? Numbers. Randomly generated numbers that make your team slightly better. Ugh.

A game praying on nostalgia to deliver a Syndicate like experience that turns out to be not a bad game - although with what i felt a lot of potential wasted somewhere between the lines.

First of - I remember somewhat the original Syndicate Wars - enough to feel nostalgic about it but not enough to draw a direct comparison between the two. Might be for the better or worse for a game review but this is how it is.

Satellite Reign is a real time squad based game set in a cyberpunk world of the future. The giant companies control the world and it's up to you and your squad to take the worst offender down. The story is simple and doesn't get much more complicated throughout the game. Most of the text is presented in writing and it's easier to just skim the text for important bits regarding the mission rather than trying to understand the story which seems a bit generic.

Mechanically this is a squad based real time strategy game. You control four members of your squad in a pretty standard set up - soldier/heavy, support/medic, hacker and infiltrator/sniper. Each of those come with a special set of skills you can upgrade with experience gained. Those are pretty cool and useful - some more than other - but generally you do feel like you're making a choice by selecting what to upgrade and it does impact the way you play later on.

Apart from the standard upgradeable skills you get to manage your squad load-out meaning guns, gear and implants. All of these feel pretty varied and provide an impact on the way you take on a mission. Some loud-outs are in fact better suited for certain missions than other - all depending on the mission type and facilities you're breaching, and your preffered game play. The amount of customisation here was pretty cool.

There is also a cloning layer - a place where you take people and by assigning them to your squad members you enhance their abilities - but I found it pretty much useless - didn't understand the concept to well and ignored it entirely. It felt wonky and combined with often dying and loosing the bonuses felt like just too much work for little gain.

Visually it's quite nice. The cyberbpunk atmosphere is there and looks really good. Although seems to be very power hungry. Sure, you can zoom in pretty close and it still lookes good but it's unplayable while zoomed in. So I was completly zoomed out the entire time. The camera for whatever artistic reason is constantly bobbing slightly left and right - didn't make me feel nauseous but I imagine it could make some people. Overall it felt like totally unnecessary thing with no way of turning it off. The graphic in general was looking good - very neon like - and fitting the setting.

The game is divided into four districts - each of follows a familiar assassin creed like structure. You have relay beacons - which when discovered reveal additional missions of which most are somewhat secondary missions but you should complete them in order to get money and experience to equip your squad and level up certain skills in preparation for the final confrontation. Sadly there are only like around five different mission types and although accompanied with large amounts of text boil down to "navigate a complex and enter a certain highlighted door". Sometimes a target you need to kill comes out of it, sometimes you get prototypes you need to carry out of the compound, or escort a certain npc in - or just enter. That's about it - the only difference will be the layout of specific facility and toughness of the enemies.

The main resource in this game is time. It's money actually, but the way you get money is by installing hacking syphons in ATM machines, which give you money over time. Which is very easily exploitable - you just need to wait to get enough time to get prototypes from black marked - which are expensive - and research them - which takes time and money but since you're not limited in any way - the time is all you need.

There is a strange kind of mechanic in the game where you need to die, and you should die in order to get experience and level up quicker. The way it is designed is for when one of your squad members is killed he should be re spawned at the relay beacon and come back to action shortly. It doesn't work that way though - for most of the time - when things get too hairy - it's over. All of your squad members get killed and you can approach the mission again with little or no consequences. But it's worth it as sending your troops for certain death adds experience which is quite valuable. The game is also susceptible to cheesing the hell out of it. Hiding in the corner and killing off one by one enemy - it's hard to tell what will trigger alarm, what will not. Additionally your hacker can hijack enemies and thus add them to your squad - making them natural cannon fodder.

The game has a bit strange paste to it. It's slow at first - you're always under equiped with low tier guns, and no money. The enemies are also a bit hard at first in comparison to your setup. This leads to tackling the first mission very stealthy - luckily the game allows for such approach and you still get experience from doing things without causing mayhem. It gets better over time and things start balancing out and stealth stops being the only viable option.

I'm glad I've stuck through the beginning part as the game picked up somewhere along mid-game and starts getting interesting. The mid and end game is far more interesting as you're much better equipped and have a lot more room for taking different approaches to each mission.

The thing this begs for is an active pause though. It would change the game significantly and i feel for the better. As things stand right now there is no other way than just move your squad as a whole. There is just to little time for any flanking or other clever maneuvering. The slow-down time ability is there for the hacker but it has almost no meaningful impact on the game play.

Overall in the end I found the game to be enjoyable despite a bit repetitive and not giving a lot of control of the action when things get spicy. I have a feeling that making small changes to the game play would make the game much more enjoyable than it is but as it stands it's still worth picking up and trying out yourself.

Boy. Love Hate this game. Really couldn't bring myself to really enjoy it though. It has many elements of Syndicate, it has some slick city scapes, some nice neon overglow, signs etc, amazing enemy variation. It plays more like a strange hybrid between traditional RTS with almost dungeon crawler kind of elements. You are doomed to die so much it unintentionally feels like a roguelike rather quickly. I know that sounds great, (and it is) but some things just kill it:

-It's too hard. This game is absolutely impossible. The game is hard in many different ways. You can't get your research going in it. You can't really grind to progress, you can't really control what you wish to research (because your research paths are random) This is frustrating for things like specific weapons you might want (such as a main weapon, like a rifle) or augmentations. These difficulties are compounded by the control.

- The controls are too difficult. To switch weapons you have to click a very small icon that rests on each of your four players. You have to manually assign Every command (such as attack an enemy that shoots at oyu...) Some actions can take precious time that do not involve hacking, like taking a rogue crit headshot with a rifle, or throwing a grenade, some movement, it would be nice to have some visual cue of how long such actions might take

-Cyberpunk is about poverty but this is kinda excessive sometimes, to get money you have to grind and repeat 'invasion' of enemy buildings, but you can't do it too often, you have to rotate. Between dying, respawning, researching, equipping and bribing to complete missions, it seems you can't get money when you really need money (at the beginning to get things going)

-The gameplay is too fast paced and overwhelms. Skills have hotkeys but it's a sheer challenge to just have four guys attacking (they will not fight back if shot at) there are also lots of skill hotkeys for abilities you unlock. It's just too much going on at once imo.. Your guys move kind of slow and bumble about in gneral, taking cover sometimes doesnt work when you are getting shot, like you get interrupted and can require some fiddling about. Worse, when you go down that can knock a guy outside cover so not only does he have to respawn out of cover, but the healer he picks him up often will step out of cover to do it. Lots of clicking not much attacking, your other two stooges are likely dead by this time too.

-You can go the stealthy route. this makes things easier. The devs were wise to allow you to gain XP this way (a very strange mechanic that i dont think i've ever seen in a game before, wher you gain XP from hiding and avoiding combat as well as fighting)

-all the businesses, signs, sodamachines walkways etc feel like it should and make for a nice city. scanning people/citizens is kind of cool too. the way reinforcements work (while annoying) feels fluid and like the city is alive and responding to your threats.

-There is this really weird camera wobble thing going on, but you get used to it, at first it drove me nuts, but I actually came to like it as it was a good way to keep me from manually panning camera and let me focus on other controls.

-The missions/writing have interesting backgrounds, some funny references to various things (especially syndicate) for those who bother to read through them.

-This soundtrack really suites the game. Some Noiry New REtro wave/synth disco that has samples whose timbre sound very similiar to the SNES at times. Unfortunately you really need to play the game with sound cues (there are some sound cues) so the music volume will get drowned out in a good gunfight.

-Cloning people to recombinate their stat bonuses into your squad was a really cool idea, espeically in that you can adopt new cosmetic features: wear their hats, masks, facial features etc... but it is more of a chore within the game to go about this because you die so damn much. Another task one must do to have edge. I wish this idea was pushed a whole lot harder, it was a novel concept. If you could have farmed the city for stat buffs and mixed them together (rather than just adopt ONE citizens stats) then you might just have the edge needed to make progress in this game if you patiently soylent the city in your agent cloning vats!

-Supposedly one explosive weapon but i couldnt find it. some good weapons reading a guide but you have to know exactly where they are. Remember how much fun the gauss gun was in the orig syndicate.? or long range weapons with knockback? Combat in this game isnt like that at all, its outfitting your squad with the three dmg types based and findinga balanace. (shield armor flesh) I personally found the weapons and combat boringly repetitive.

-Researching and unlocking tech is not that exciting or interesting. The weapons don't have much spice and in general lack novelty (I am assuming i didnt find the better ones) I feel research was really neglected and could have been pushed a lot harder.

Somewhat fun game with some nice things thrown into it but the fun is crippled by its difficulty and other elements which kind of just kill it.. The slick visuals and aesthetic don't save it imo. You really have to slog through and grind slowly through the city to make progress, to such an extent i find it rather unnecesary and un-fun. Giving the ability to upgrade your crew more, and chose more stats, skills, maybe even customize your weapons, etc would have been enough to provide the edge needed. I want to get that sweet research going like in XCOM or Alpha Centauri and pick how things go. Instead I get no choice and no clue as to where to find what to research. While playing as a solo covert agent seems to be a more easy to control and way to skillfully play, you can't always, and when you do, the game still doesnt quite feel tactical like that at all. You can pure stealth a good bit of it. Fighting in it stinks, but even if you could pure stealth, would it make sense to play the whole game with 1 unit?

Here at Satellaview Reeindeer we feels less like a rival corp and much more like a band of anarcho-thugs jaded with capitalism. Mainly because we have no money and can maybe pull together 20 dollars between the four of us as we prepare for our next heist to scalp pennies off the local vid/payphone with homemade phreaking box we stole and then modified with our own blood sweat and tears knowing we will probably become caught, lose our shit and get gunned down in front of the strip mall. Another day another dollar. When it reigns it poors.