Satellite Reign

I've played this game for five hours and I'm now uninstalling it. I bought it on sale and installed the patch. When it works it's wonderful. There are moments in this game that play like the sense/net heist from neuromancer. But the flaws are so frustrating. I can't deal with it anymore. When I ran the game I noticed a lot of slow down when I zoomed the camera all the way out. So I turned off all the video effects and set the video quality to "low." That didn't fix the slowdown. Then I started noticing the bugs. -Tool-tips will pop up and stay on the screen forever. -Whenever I scroll, my cursor changes modes. When I left-clicked on a civillian thinking my cursor was still in scan mode, my agents all pulled their guns out and shot her to death, right in front of the cops. -Agents will stop moving when I use the scroll keys. If I tell my agents to walk to a faraway position I can't scroll away to view a different part of the map, because my agents will stop walking. -Agents' pathfinding+behavior is inconsistent and unintuitive. They'll sprint when I tell them to walk, take unpredictable paths to reach positions right next to them. -The interface is bad. I had to figure out how the cloning system worked all on my own, and the tutorial actually made it more confusing. It skipped over important steps. -Because of the unreliable controls, I decided to scumsave in the middle of a mission, but the game hadn't explained the rules of manual saving I wasn't allowed to save while trespassing. My agent spazzed out, got spotted and died, and I had to reload an hour-old autosave. -Party members can't trade equipment while trespassing. This isn't a bug, it's just dumb. If I want my support to trade his sniper rifle for the hacker's UZI they should be able to do that if they're right next to eachother. But no! they have travel to a beacon, which they can't do if they're in an enemy base, surrounded by unaware guards and drones.

I really enjoyed this game during a rainy week off. My total play time was just over 40 hours for total completion. The real joy in the game is leveling/outfitting your squad, then going on the next mission with your new kit. All the areas have multiple ways to approach them, with further entry options available depending on your augments. I appreciated how by the end game, once your squad is fully decked out, they feel really powerful. At the start of the game I had to be really careful with my engagements; by the end I was confident about storming the front gate to compounds. I will say the final mission was a challenge and the ending was surprising. I gave the game 4 stars because despite all the great tactical options and enjoyable gameplay, it did have some quality-of-life issues. A big one is whenever you load a game, you have to reset your squad quick keys and re-ping your mission objectives. Nothing terribly arduous, but a noticeable inconvenience. Also had the game crash twice to desktop. I tend to save often, but it was unexpected. Overall happy with my purchase and felt like time well spent. If an expansion is ever released, I would happily jump back in for another playthrough.

Hoped it would be, feared it wouldn't be a modernised version of Syndicate Wars on Playstation form the mid 90's. In fairness it is. Every bit as infuriating, as when the code does what it wants to do rather than what its told. Agents glitching in the graphics at the most febrile moments! But the mood and dept of the game takes you with it and sets a pretty good sence of immersion. If it had had a bigger bufdger and some more time in development it would certainly have stood out a game for the ages. Who knows maybe it will. But yeah... totally glad I bought it and know it'll be on my rotation in the future. Dig it!

Massive Syndicate Wars fan, and I enjoyed Syndicate. A game that killed your whole squad within 1 of starting the last mission. Yet that wasn't as frustrating as this mess of a game is. Constantly. I just fast travelled my squad, but a glitch left 1 member behind. then another glitch caused the other 3 agents to overlay each other. So I tested out the time slow ability, and didn't realise it deselects all my team. So then I test killing a lone enemy and get all confused when I have to reselect my team and then cancel time slow which again deselects my team. So now I've got a bunch of enemies attacking my 3 agents (I thought it was 4 but they're all bunched up) and I can't understand why the fourth is getting killed. Then I realised what happened. So for a game that expects a working system from the player, it's built on a flawed engine, with flawed design decisions and is still full of glitches. Your squad gets stuck in the terrain. They don't respond to commands properly. They get stuck while shooting enemies in the back from stealth. The pathfinding is a mess. Simple commands with easy situations end up with all out war against impossible odds because your agent went the wrong way. I played this game when it came out and rage quit. And for the past week I've tried getting back into it. Restarted over 15 times to 'get gud' the sheer FRUSTRATION of the Unity engine and all its quirks and the glitches that the developers obviously gave up on just makes the game a massive chore. Oh, and to add insult to injury I can run Cyberpunk in high graphical settings but (yet again) the Unity engine is setting the fans off every once in a while. And there's microstutters. Save yourself some agro, don't buy this game unless you're desperate for soemthing to play. And we should boycott the Unity engine. I supported and spent more money that I care to admit on Unity games and they're all hardly worth playing once because the engine is such garbage.

I was initially worried by the fact that this was a real time game. I figured it'd end up getting too frustrating for me, too overwhelming, too unfair. Maybe I was worried that it would stop being fun. Happily, Satellite Reign stays fun, open and rewarding to the very end. The open world style of the game really adds to it; once you become familiar with the systems, it's very cool to take on new areas, formulate new strategies and unlock new gear. The design rewards creative gameplay with plenty of options to choose from - in comparing notes with a friend, it was clear we played the game with totally different strategies. The presentation is superb; a great aesthetic, both aurally and visually, and it really adds to the feel of the whole game. Absolutely compelling, and well worth a look. I hope to see more of this.