Satellite Reign

Let's get this out of the way. This game has nothing to do with syndicate beyond having 4 agents in a cyberpunk dystopia. While Syndicate and Syndicate wars were action games Satellite Reign is more of a stealth game closer related to titles like Commandos than action titles Syndicate or Cannon Fodder. So if you want to play SR like you did Syndicate then prepare for getting your teeth kicked in my nearly infinite waves of reinforcements you can't escape from because your asthmatic agents can't run across the street without running out of stamina. Guess trading in that lung for extra chrome and led lights on your coat wasn't that good of an idea in hindsight eh? The game is a bit better (as in possible to play) as a stealth game but even then it has gaping holes like the absolute lack of sightlines. How far does this soldier see? Who knows! And you don't even get the handy tool from the old Commandos games that let you check if a certain area is being watched or not. But hey that's not the least of the games problems. You have limited sight range so you can't study patrol paths anyway so you will get blindsided by a guard you never seen before sooner than later as some groups have REALLY long routes. And even if you manage to study the movements of patrols there is no guarantee they will stick to them as sometimes their pathfinding messes up and they change direction mid turn. And if you were sneaking behind their back at the time then have fun and get ready to defend y... oh wait... you are better off just reloading the save. So far the only tactic that worked for me was using 1 or 2 agents as sacrificial lambs starting a shootout in one part of the compound causing EVERYONE to rush in there and completing the objective with the infiltrator while the rest of the squad is annihilated. Then respawn the decoys and start another ruckus so that the infiltrator can get away. if you want a new syndicate then keep looking. And there are better stealth games than this.

While this game was marketed with Syndicate's name, it is nothing like the legend itself. As a Syndicate fanboy I feel ripped off. Voiceover, music and sound FX are poorly done. Graphics are not really special: everything is made "shiny" for the sake of futuristic coolness. Artistically, overall, the game is shallow, and frankly the design of the characters resemble a bunch of Lady Gaga concert rejects. There is no management aspect, no world screen, and basically you are always on the same big map (yet still loading screens). The big map your guys never leave, is seperated into sectors. There is no quicksaving, you can only save (and access your resources, weapon arsenal etc) at nodes and when you fail a mission you are spawned at the last node you visited. Autosaves are forgiving so saving is not an immense issue, there are worse things. Every sector have exactly the same missions which you can easily cheese. You can't pick up weapons, you have to buy blueprints from black market and research and then buy the weapons from a shop. Money comes only from ATM siphoning, scientists and agents are recruited at random by scanning NPCs, bribing or hijacking them. You can not drive cars, you can not blow up anything other than security doors. In the "real" one you'd get missions to recruit agents & scientists, robbing banks for money etc. or you'd get rewarded for killing rival agents, blow up armored cars and grab the loot on your way out. A few setups in upgrades from a pile of junk can carry you to the anticlimactic ending easily. NPC pathing & AI is really bad: you get these guards of different factions casually walking into restricted areas of other factions and starting little wars or civilian NPCs waltzing into restricted zones causing all hell to break loose, of course, sometimes messing up your progress. Breaking aggro is easy as runnig around a corner. There are silly things like you can't 1 shot a guy with sniper rifle but can "assasinate" with the basic pistol.

I really did enjoy the game: strategic, hectic, difficult... everything I enjoy. If you enjoyed the old syndicate games you are bound to enjoy this as well. Some of the early missions could be very redundant, sending me to the same area multiple times, but fortunately this only happend when trying to get to the industrial sector. In spite of this minor issue, I would have given it a much better rating, but it was very buggy. Most of these bugs I would have only expected in a game before the first few patches. A few of the bugs I ran into: Getting stuck in the environment, fortunately most of the time this bug can be seen before it happen. When you take cover behind an object sometimes the arrow will be inside of the object. Sometimes when loading the game it would restart the tutorial in the middle of the game making it impossible to proceed without forcing the game closed. This appears to happen mostly when I accidentally clicked the load button twice. AI would occasionally get caught on scenery or had ridiculous pathfinding, this one just seemed to happen on occasion but would break immersion. I cannot give the game a bad review, though the bugs were plentiful it was a good game underneath, it just could have been a whole lot better. I still recommend that you buy it, but only if you can get it on sale.

I have played old syndicate wars (second game in the series i think) and this game has lots of the same things that one did. There was bit more story in the old one with its missions based campaign. But in these games the main thing is (to me) to research new tech to edit your arsenal so you can infiltrate the more difficult sectors on the map. A bit more destructible environment would be great though. Tip. be sure to take the support agents time slowing skill early, makes fights a lot more enjoyable.

I knew I was going to enjoy a real time, futuristic, squad based game but this is better than I expected. Nicely sized hubs with multiple objectives. Multiple approches to each objective. Lots of abilities to equip each of the classes with. Good controls, visuals and sound. The strory so far is your usual bring-down-the-evil-corp but whatever. Game is great.