Satellite Reign

I'm an old vet of the original Syndicate/Syndicate Wars games, loved them to death. If you did too, you will love this, and need no further explanation. It's made by the same team of people that made Syndicate Wars, and it shows! If you're not the above person: Satellite Reign is a cyberpunk RTS of sorts, where you lead a team of 4 cybernetically enhanced agents through the city from a top-down view, conducting espionage, assassinations, theft, and all other sorts of neat corporate brutality. Need to get into a police station to recover someone? You could just blast your way in the front gates, mowing down all life. You could hack the facility's systems, shutting down cameras, power to doors, and other things. You could sneak in quietly from a power line across the street, never letting anyone know you were there. All in all, it's an amazing game, and one I'm glad I got in Early Access. The atmosphere, the mechanics of combat/hacking/stealth/taking over other people to use for your amusement, it's all spot-on, and I cannot recommend this game enough. Give it a shot, you won't regret it! I might have voiced one of the newscasters in this game, but that shouldn't affect your decision either way. :P

Back when I was sitting my GCSEs I spent a lot of time playing Syndicate Wars (instead of revising). These were the heady days of the late '90s. 'A Design for Life' was on every radio station, Father Ted was being quoted by every kid in the playground and PC Zone still had Charlie Brooker. Ahhh, happier days. Syndicate Wars saw you take control of four terrorists attempting to bring down some mega corporation. It was atmospheric and difficult with some unique systems: mind controlling people, turning them into human bombs, then shooting your way out of trouble with miniguns... Ahhh, as I say, happier days. It's on GOG, btw, and still great. Satellite Reign is heralded as a spiritual successor to the Syndicate series. Apparently. Everyone has to say this. What this means is it looks like Bladerunner, plays like Commandos and sounds like Vangelis' 'China'. Got it? Good. You control a squad of four terrorist super-soldiers attempting to bring down 'the man'. You do this in an open world in real-time. In-game you have two main interfaces. The first is the isometric cityscape in which you maneuver your soldiers and complete missions. The second is a text-based menu which allows you to read about and select missions, equip your soldiers and conduct basic research. A typical experience might involve breaking into a facility, looting some prototype weaponry, escaping, then logging into your research facility to get your boffins to produce the weapon en masse so you can equip your soldiers with it. The game has also borrowed some elements from Watch Dogs, making it feel like a 2015 open world game - there are 'beacons' to activate (akin to Ubisoft's towers), ATMS to hack and new researchers to find and bribe. So it is a great game, but flawed. The save system is a hassle - but it does discourage save-scumming; enemy line-of-sight is inconsistent; there are plenty of minor bugs; and it can feel a little repetitive. Still, this is a welcome update for the Syndicate series

Be warned. This is very different genre than classic Syndicate or Syndicate Wars. The old Syndicate was a team-based tactical SHOOTER. With all the hype of classic Syndicate revival I expected Satellite reign to be that as well. But instead it's 100% STEALTH. A completely different genre. And the stealth is very badly implemented ! Trying to play this game as Syndicate - by drawing your guns and diving into firefight - only end up in a lot of frustration and sooner rather than later a death of your whole team. - Through the whole game enemies are constantly upgrading to vastly outclass you in every aspect. Did you invest all your money into, and finally have, a Heavy armor ? Enemies now have that plus energy shields AND 2x better weapons. Did you finally get a heavy Plasma minigun ? Well suck it, half of enemies through WHOLE game now magicaly became huge mechs with almost infinite hitpoints. (I am not making this up ): - New weapons as well as all the other gear is made available to you absolutely at random. So there's a high chance you'll end up like me and for HALF of the game you'll only be able to get 5 different pistols (which are as you can guess good for nothing) and no advanced weaponry or shields. So the game forces you to give up any fun of shooting and instead makes you to play very tedious stealth. The problem is it's not implemented well. - You can't see enemies cone of vision and the way enemies detect you is very unpredictable and buggy. Enemy can often detect you from impossible angle and while you're hiding, and raise alarm - often ruining your mission. - Enemy groups and patrol paths seem to be generated randomly too, so there often doesn't seem to be a way to sneak past them. And killing them stealthily (in groups and with sniping-imune drones) is really difficult to impossible. I am really disappointed. I expected old good action-oriented Syndicate in better graphics. I got broken, frustrating stealth-only game.

Overall a great game. I'm giving it 4 stars because it's not quite what I wanted, but I think what I wanted out of the game would have been beyond the scope of 5 Lives to do in both budget and skill set. For the price it's really worth it. Pros: + atmosphere is fantastic + music is excellent + I run an older computer and it plays relatively well, which is impressive + One single open world with a series of missions to undergo, no load times or levels or anything. You can complete them however you choose, or not complete them if you choose. + Many different options on how you approach a given mission, all of which is heavily based on how you upgrade and outfit your team. You can go in hard with guns blazing or sneak in any number of ways. + Lots of character customization options Cons: again most of these I think are beyond the scope of the project but it really is what I wanted out of the game. All of my issues relate to the AI of the opposing factions. - The factions are essentially stationary targets with no personalities. When your threat level goes to zero, they go back to doing whatever they were doing. A guy you were just unloading bullets into and killed half of his teammates you can walk by 2 minutes later and he ignores you because your threat level went down. That seems a bit... odd. Given the mechanics of cloning and swapping bodies, I would think a given face might be flagged for arrest or something, forcing you to change your face to run around incognito. - the corps personalities are solely in the data messages you hack and slight variations in equipment but not much else. - There should be some sort of global threat level and a chance where the corps come and hunt you down for causing so much ruckus. - I was hoping for a dynamic world that adjusted based on the missions you undertake, sadly that wasn't the case. It's a really fun game for the price and it's essentially a sandbox cyberpunk world to play in; I just wanted more.